You called at 9:02 AM to resolve one small thing.
It is 9:41.
You now know this song better than any song you have chosen to listen to.
The Opening Menu
“Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.”
They have not changed. They have never changed. That sentence has been playing since 2009 and is a load-bearing lie.
You press 3. Then 2. Then 4. Then it asks you to say your issue out loud, in a sentence, to a machine.
You say “billing.” It says “I heard: cancel service.“
The Account Number Ritual
You enter your sixteen-digit account number with the keypad.
You do it carefully. You get it right.
When the human finally picks up, they ask for your account number.
You give it verbally. They type it in. It was never transmitted. That entire step existed for no reason and everyone involved knows it.
The Music
It’s a loop. About 40 seconds long. It has a saxophone in it.
There’s a spot at the 27-second mark where the audio quality drops — a compression artifact baked into the file decades ago — and you now anticipate it. You wait for it. You’ve heard it eighty times.
You will hear that saxophone in the shower tomorrow. It has moved in.
The Interruption Tease
The music cuts.
You sit up. This is it. A human.
“Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.”
It cuts every ninety seconds to tell you nothing, and every single time your heart rate rises, and every single time it’s the recording. You never stop falling for it.
The Speakerphone Vigil
You put it on speaker. You set the phone on the desk.
You try to do something else. You cannot commit to any task, because at any moment a human may appear and you’ll have four seconds to become a coherent person.
So you do nothing productive for 39 minutes. You are being held, not on hold.
The Transfer
A human! You explain everything. Fully. With detail.
“Okay, I’m going to transfer you to the right department.”
You say wait — no —
Click. Music.
Different music. New saxophone. The counter resets to zero.
The Disconnect
At minute 52, the call ends.
Not a hang-up. Not a click. Just… over. Four bars of music and then silence and then the home screen.
There is no recourse. No callback. No record that you were ever there.
You look at the phone. You do not scream. You’ve been through this before.
The Second Call
You call back. You press 3, 2, 4. You say “billing.”
You wait for the saxophone.
There it is. Like an old friend. Like family.