September 15, 2022 • 31 mins
We've all been there -- you're calling a bank, a loan company, you name it, and boom: you're put on hold. But where does that music come from? In today's episode, Ben and Noel dive into the strange origin story of telephone holding music.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give a big hand
to our guest producer today, the one and only Tari Harrison.
Uh no, uh oh, and I've been uh. You and
I are big Tary fans. Right, you're the crowd going
(00:48):
while I do. They're losing their minds man, and we
you know I am part of the crowd, so I
am also losing my mind over all. Right to answer
your previous question, yes, big big Tary Harrison fan. When
Tar is not class seen up Ridiculous History, she is
working on one of our favorite shows in the Ridiculous Universe.
That's ridiculous news. With our pals uh Mark and Bill.
(01:11):
You may recognize them from a previous appearance on this show.
That happened, right, yeah, no, that happened. We're in person.
I mean, the universe is pretty ridiculous. Who can keep
track of all the goings ons, the comings and goings
on of the Ridiculous Universe? But no, I do believe
you are correct, So didn't happen in like a in
then the Ridiculous Multiverse it was definitely in this ridiculous
(01:33):
universe that we occupy currently. That's true. It's all true, folks. Uh.
And you know, I like this statement about the universe
like thinking metaphysically, because this is a true story. A
few weeks ago, I had a dream where I was
talking to what I think was God, but I got
(01:56):
put on hold and I woke up convinced I had
heard this amazing music. And you know how it is
when your mind creates something in a dream. I spent
like twenty very blurry, not fully awake moments trying to
record the two night I had heard. Uh, and I'm
afraid to play it back, but just as uh, we
(02:17):
were getting on to record today, Uh, you had when
you came on, you were listening to real life, not
dream hold music. Yeah, man, I hold music is interesting
because it is a thing that's been around for a
long time. So folks have, um have the opportunity to
do a better job at it. Let's just say some
(02:37):
have taken that challenge and run with it. Uh and
and made you know, have very high fidelity hold music.
I've been on hold in my car before and I
literally heard like low end bumping, you know, on my
on my set, I don't even have like a fancy
system or anything in my car. But you know, with
the with the hands free, you know, connected, I was
hearing all kinds of low end fidelity and crisp hies
and mids and in that music. Uh, not the case
(02:59):
with the decay Have County Watershed, which is who I
was on hold with this morning. It's all staticky, uh
really broken up, very harsh, you know highs. It's just
like very unpleasant to listen to. Also stylistically all over
the place. I gotta say like it goes from like
something that sounds sort of like a sound alike the
Police song, like sort of a rock sand vibe, to
(03:21):
like Mendelssohn and then back again, all interspersed with a
very kindly voice telling me that the rates are going
up six percent, so super helpful. Didn't actually get a person,
That's why I was sharing this with you. I was
on hold for an hour, so uh, get your house
together to cab County Watershed. Your hold game um is
weak and your customer service is weaker. Yeah. I also
(03:45):
want to give a very special thanks to a musician
named Alex Cornell. I've i've mentioned this. I can't remember
it's on air off, but for many years, during one
iteration of our corporate overlords or another. Uh. This company
where where I have worked for more years than I
(04:06):
care to announce. Uh, this company had a hold song
that had lyrics and had a country vibe. It's called
I'm on Hold by Alex Cornell. I'm not gonna play it.
I don't think we should, but if you want to
stare into the void, folks, then journey with me and
(04:27):
Alex Cornell. There, Alex, I bear you no ill will.
It is not your faults. But after having been on
hold with your song for a number of years, for
egregiously long times, uh, it did break my mind a
little bit. If there is someone we need to thank
slash blame for this, well, it is not the water authorities.
(04:48):
It is not Alex Cornell. It's not even an elevator
operator back when those were a thing. It is a
man named Albert Levy, who in nineteen sixt you filed
a patent for something called a telephone hold program system.
Levy is the guy who invented the idea of listening
(05:12):
to something other than silence when you are waiting on Uh.
When you are waiting on a human to answer the
other end of the telephone. Uh. This really was the
idea of alleviating border I guess, or as he as
he puts it, occupying a collar. Yeah, it's neat. Um.
(05:36):
It's certainly in the days of you know, switchboards and
and um, you know of telef telefe telephone telephony being
much more of an all encompassing thing. If you weren't
on the telephone network, you weren't part of this world. Um. Now,
obviously with cell phones and computers and something like, it's
much less stress being put on that system and it's
almost becoming kind of a thing of the past. But yeah,
(05:58):
I mean the idea of, like, I mean, to wait
for a human to help you with your problem. Um,
why not give you a little something to occupy your
time with, or at the very least, you know, keep
you from hanging up, to encourage you to kind of
stick around. So what is the deal with the concept
of holding? Right? This is the definitely like something that
had to be kind of creative, the idea of being
put on hold. In twelve, the Sydney Morning Herald Um
(06:22):
reported on a man in Adelaide who was kept on
hold with an airline called Quantas for fifteen hours fifteen
hours and and this was not necessarily due to the
soothing tones of whatever you know, hold music was being
shows it, but it was apparently as a result of
a recorded message that you know, this is again part
(06:43):
of the irony of being on hold, this sort of
liminal kind of like um limbo space that we occupy.
This voice assuring the gentleman that customer Service AGA would
be with him quote soon. So you just stayed on.
I've been there, you know. Sometimes there there will be
a message saying in the times are longer than usual,
and so you can kind of mentally prepare, but you know,
you can have it on speaker and just do other stuff.
(07:06):
That's what he did. He was working and reading and
just waiting. And as he told the newspaper, quote I
wanted to find out exactly what they meant when they
said they would be with me as soon as possible.
So obviously this guy's kind of taking a stand for
the little guy. I appreciate that. Um. And and this
is you mentioned Ben thinking metaphysically earlier. This is ultimately
(07:28):
this idea of the whole space and what that occupies
in our minds and our lives. Is kind of a
philosophical or metaphysical question. Yeah, I like to call it
audio purgatory. That's really what what whole being on hold is. Also,
want to shout out Tom Vanderbilt over at Slate Rode
(07:50):
a roade a great article. We're pulling a lot of
this from called your Call is important to us. Uh.
What we may not know, especially if we're some of
our younger, ridiculous historians in the crowd, is that back
in the day, you had to be on hold just
to make a call. The first transatlantic telephone call occurred
(08:14):
from New York to Paris, and The New York Times
wrote about it in describing it like this, For those
who speak for the first time, there is no thrill
comparable to that which comes with the first signal. You know,
New York Hall is coming through. Hold the line, Wait
a minute. That minute is a thing of every mixed emotions.
One feels that something memorable should be spoken and can
(08:37):
think of nothing to say. So for early callers, you know,
you don't quite know if it's gonna go through. Your
sort of waiting in the wings to see if you're
part of the play will actually commence. And one thing
we didn't say about Levy. We'll put this in the
title to make up for it, folks. But one thing
(08:57):
we didn't say about our buddy Andrew Andy to his
friends is that he sort of accidentally invented this thing.
Originally he owned a factory. And no, it wasn't a
factory that made musac. It wasn't a factory that made telephones.
It was a factory that had a problem with its
(09:18):
own phone service. And this is where Tom Vanderbilt notes
over at Slate that a loose wire was touching a
steel girder, and the steel then was acting as an
antenna and was picking up a signal from a radio
station nearby. The wire tapped into the audio, and then
(09:38):
all of a sudden, when you were on hold calling
Levy's factory, instead of just hearing nothing but the hum
of the void, perhaps or some little clicks and audio ghost,
you would you would hear the station's broadcast. And Levy
didn't know about this until someone who had been on
hold told him, and he said, hey, uh, Andy, uh,
(10:03):
you know I'm calling about the Tuesday thing. I just
want you to know. The radio was playing when I'm
when I'm on hold, and uh, that's brilliant. You're a
smart guy. I'll order six more thinking about bobbers or
whatever it is you make at your factory widgets, you know,
do dads. So it's kind of interesting because you know,
(10:28):
we we already had music as a brand, you know,
kind of um getting trademarked in nineteen fifty four. Um,
and there I I guess that was sort of in
the zeitgeist. I mean, like you know, to your point,
Pamis was kind of done by a mistake, you know,
I mean, when I hear a bare wire touching a
metal girder, I'm glad nobody was killed. Instead, they just
(10:51):
got some like pleasant lilting you know tunes piped in,
you know, on the line. Um. But I do believe
there is some kind of parallel thinking going on here
because music is also, of course, this concept designed around
filling boredom in like you know, kind of procedural interactions
with music with something that kind of like make you
(11:12):
feel like you're not actually in some sort of hellish
liminal space. You know, God knows what when you'll ever
get out things like the d M V or or
in an elevator or what or what have you. This
was just taking it kind of into the virtual space.
And I guess if you think about it, telephones are really,
in many ways the first form of virtual communication where
you're not actually occupying the same space. Um. So yeah,
(11:34):
the the idea of the telephone hold program seems pretty um,
pretty innocuous on its surface, but it has really you know,
created an incredible legacy of of this thing and of
various iterations um and uh. You know again, it was
designed for a very specific purpose, and it all kind
of has its roots I guess the idea of being
(11:56):
put on hold in those earliest days of tele phone
communication the switchboard, where you would you know, call the
switchboard operator and say I'd like to place my call
to like you know, WHICHITA to five three or whatever
it would be, and I mean, like, ho, please, we'll
try the connection and you you could be on hold
for a while, and like you said, been this whole
idea of like what do I say when they come?
(12:17):
That's kind of where the idea of telephone etiquette came from, right,
the idea of saying hello or ahoihoi or whatever it
might be. You know, Yeah, and this whole. This whole
idea of being on hold and needing to fill that
with something um to kind of keep people from getting anxious.
Maybe hanging up came from these earliest days of telephone communication.
(12:38):
M hmm, yeah, you have. May you may have called,
for instance, the doctor's office and had the receptionists say, uh,
you know, uh, Dr Crinkleberries medical facility and crinkles. Also
we sell hold police because they're really busy and they
have to switch back and forth. This was happening with
(13:00):
literally every busy switchboard back in the day. And this
was exasperating to Levy, at least if you believe the
language of his patent, and we're not going to read
you the whole thing because like many patents, it's quite long.
But his entry to the patent office, which as he
said Curse in nineteen sixty two in Spring, says in
(13:22):
the course of receiving telephone calls, and it goes on
to talk about the dead silence, the collar has to
endure while operators are trying to chase down their parties.
And then you know what happens if an operator forgets
to check in again, what if they get busy? Uh,
the application has a key line here. In any event,
(13:43):
listening to a completely unresponsive instrument is tedious, and calls
are often abandoned altogether or remade, which leads to annoyance
and a waste of time and money. And so the
idea is that when you put them on hold, do
you just hit some sort of button that puts the
callers line on a source of program material, often music,
(14:08):
but it could really be anything. It could be a lawnmower,
it could be a cat yelling if you know, if
you are angry at the caller, uh. And the ideas
this would pacify them and maybe you know, now I
think about it in a time of high stress, the
idea was, maybe it'll give them a little chill room,
a little green room in the great performance of life.
(14:29):
And this idea, you know, it starts off with music,
but eventually someone realizes we can use this space, this
literally captive audience as people to advertise to. And so
by the nineties, companies began mixing music with messages. There
(14:50):
was one company we found called American Telephone Tapes that
would purposely find announcers with sultry voices to break into
the music every forty seconds or so, kind of like
a higher a higher cadence of the DJs that you
hear on radio today. Yeah, it's interesting because I mean,
(15:12):
you know the idea of advertising on these uh these
whole spaces. I don't referring to it so like like
uh mystically, but it really is kind of a space
you have to you have to kind of interact with it,
you know, like you know, you have to uh be
aware of it, you have to occupy it to some degree. Um.
But I think I don't I don't know that I've
ever heard like advertisements for like outside products, because I
(15:34):
think companies to these days are so aware that being
on hold is just the last place anyone wants to be.
And usually there are ways of of not having to
call and deal with a person, of of paying bills
or sorting out issues you know online. But I don't
know about you, Ben, but I sometimes for certain things
I really want to talk to a person. Um. Maybe
(15:57):
I'm old fashioned, but um what I will here if
not advertisements. I think people today maybe just wouldn't put
up with that on being on a really long hold
and then also feeling like you're being you know, shield
to buy other products and companies that are unrelated to
the the you know, service or or company that you're calling. Um,
there will be internal messages, you know, things like UM E,
(16:21):
T N D now has uh, you know, pay as
you go or whatever it might be, you know, and
that's gonna be a little more palatable. And if all
of a sudden, you know, you're hearing an advertisement for
some other thing, I think a lot of people would
be very cranky about that. Yeah, and it also could
make your business look bad. I mean, it doesn't make
your bank look particularly awesome if all of a sudden
(16:43):
they're having ads for you know, uh, chiropractors or something
in your area. So yeah, there was definitely a diminishing return.
And I agree with you. The vast majority of messages
you're gonna hear while you're on hold nowadays are going
to be internal advertisements, right, special offers from the company
(17:04):
that you are already calling. And that might be a
bit of a pickle for the folks who have to
answer the phone when they get through that phone queue.
Let me say this on behalf of everybody on the
planet who has ever worked in a call center. If
you have a problem with a company, if you are
very angry at a company. The person you are talking
(17:28):
to is not in charge of that decision. They will
do their best to help you, but they take a
lot of abuse from people who are just looking for
a punching bag. You don't have to be that person, folks.
You can be better than that. And I've had you know,
like anybody else, I've had a lot of conversations about
egregious or acrimonious things that a company has done. But
(17:51):
I always try to remember that person on the front
lines is not the CEO. They're not the person in
charge of whatever went wrong. They are there to help you,
and the best you can do to show that you
appreciate that help is not be an utter pill to them.
And uh, I hope getting some amends from people who
(18:13):
work in call centers or have worked in call centers.
It is a very tough job. I was working at
an insurance call center once upon a time when Hurricane
Katrina hit and it was just a horrific situation all around. Also,
if we could bring Levy back and tell him the
(18:36):
results of his invention, the results of his very forward
thinking accidentally discovered patent, I would say that he might
be surprised. A lot of people just don't like hold music.
Now they expect it, they don't like it, and just
like our caller over there in quantas, you know, eventually
(18:56):
you have to start questioning the absurdity of that canvass
bonds that's always like fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes as soon
as possible. I get the feeling most of the time
there isn't really a system in place that lets them
(19:17):
gauge like call volume. So I think it's all pretty canned,
like like in terms of like the expectation and um,
you know, I think some whold systems maybe a little
more robust than others, a little more like automated and
have computer you know, um intervention to some degree. I
think for the most part, it's kind of like we'll
get to you when we get to you here, enjoy this,
(19:37):
uh this little xylophone diddy and to to to get
you through and keep you from going insane or make
you go insane, because that's the thing about hold music too.
You're not gonna hear top forty jams or like the
radio because I imagine, um and then maybe maybe you
know this specifically that this is a consist is a
form of broadcast kind of. I mean, it's it's a
(19:58):
broadcast of well and I guess directly to you, but
it's happening, you know, in a lot of different iterations,
So you would have to own the copyright to the music,
which is why a lot of wold music it will
be the same thing over and over and over again
because the company is either you know, licensed this for
use in this way or possibly even you know, hired
(20:19):
somebody to do it for them to create this whole music. Uh,
perhaps it's some iteration of their theme, you know, tune
or whatever it might be, if it's a brand that
has you know, an associated jingle or something like that.
Or it'll be classical music, public domain music, and all
I have to do is license the recording um and
not and and pay any kind of any rights soldiers
for the actual compositions. Yeah. Yeah. It always reminds me
(20:44):
of an amazing bit from an amazing show called thirty Rock,
where wherein they want to make a biopic about Janice Joplin,
but they can't afford the rights, or they don't have
the rights to her, to her life story or or
her music, so they call her Janice Jorplin or something
(21:06):
like that, and they do nothing but parody lyrics of
of of famous Jannis Chopolin and the Heartbreaker songs. It
is amazing. I am going to pull up a clip
at some point if I get a break today. Uh,
you know it is true. Uh people also get this
(21:29):
sort of this weird relationship with Hold music. When you
hear it, often it becomes like a commercial jingle or
people start to love it at first ironically and then
an ironically, like me with Alex's I'm on Hold song again, Alex,
I don't know what our legality is here, so I
wish I could play it. But if you're hearing this
(21:51):
right in and let me know if it's okay to
play it, We'll end an episode with it one day.
And I'm glad that you mentioned the idea of having
a relationship with this these bits of themera that are
kind of meant to be pretty disposable. Um that there
are communities even that come up around like being obsessed
with a particular brand of Hold music, or say, like
you know, Walmart Music, you know from throughout the years,
(22:13):
like you can actually get tapes and recordings of like
all of that stuff and people like remix them and
do all kinds of crazy stuff. But um, there is
a really interesting story behind the generic hold music from
the tech company Cisco. UM. Cisco, who you know, installs
and maintains like corporate telephone systems, and apparently they're there
(22:34):
to this day, I believe, at least as of this article.
In so they may have changed it. I can't speak
to I haven't been on holding on a Cisco system
UH in recent years, but there is a piece of
music that they have used. Um Ira Glass actually did
an episode of This American Life that was composed by
an I T guy UM that you probably haven't heard of,
(22:55):
by the name of Tim Carlton UM. This article from
The Atlantic by extas c Magical describes him as a
mostly unnoogle able UM I T guy Tim Carlton UH
And in fact, on the Atlantic article they posted a
YouTube clip of the piece of music, and it has
been removed due to a copyright claim by Tim Carlton.
(23:19):
So he's got skin in the game when it comes
to this. But he had a buddy named Derek Deal
who went to work for Cisco, and he heard one
of his little ditties that he had recorded on a
four track and was like, this is it, this is
the one, this is this is gonna this has got
to be the the cisco Hold music. Um. And eventually
it did go on to become the cisco Hold music
and um, you know, was heard by millions. Not exactly
(23:42):
the way I would consider people thinking about breaking into
the industry or becoming a star, but you can't deny
that this dude's tune has been heard by millions of people.
And there has been almost a little community that has
developed around it, with people remixing it, recording their own versions,
posting things on you Tube, and all of that stuff.
(24:02):
It's fascinating. Yeah, And speaking of fascinating and gratitude, iowa
big thanks to Sophie Hagney. I just found this MPR article,
Like I just found it as we were as we
were recording, I was thinking about that relationship too, and
I was thinking about you, Alex Cornell, my favorite paras
(24:22):
social relationship that I have. There's an MPR article about
Alex and about the I'm on Hold song. It was
for Uber conference. It's selected by nine out of ten
call organizers, or at least it was as of it
plays a million times a month. And this comes directly
from Craig Walker, the CEO of dial Pad, the company
(24:45):
that owns uber Conference, which was a phone line that
we used a lot for work back in the day.
Alex Cornell is not a working musician, man. This is
I'm on Hold is the only song he's ever written
because he was a co founder of uber Conference and
he wanted to have better hold music. Holy smokes, hold
(25:08):
e smokes. I should say uh this yeah, right, Nope,
on left behind. So we see that there is an
entire You could rightly call this a genre, right if
you think about how many people listen to it on
a daily basis, then hold music hits a lot of ears.
And I didn't know this either, man, but apparently there
(25:33):
is a thing called a comfort tone that companies might
transmit even when you think you're just silently on hold
for a moment, which is when the maybe the person
at the call center hits the mute button and you
think you're on hold. They can still hear you if
you're you know, like cursing to yourself or having another
conversation anyway. A comfort tone is a barely audible synthetic
(25:56):
noise that signals a connection is still there, very like
a hug from a ghost for your ears. It's a
weird way to put it, but hold music itself is
a weird thing. And uh, you know, no, this might
be a shorter one for us today, but I remain
astounded that the guy who patented telephone holds music did
(26:22):
it because of an accident. You know, the history of
communications and technology, they're often happy accidents, you know. I
talked about this um with folks that I record music with.
For example, like a lot of studio equipment and things
that that have have grown to become used in a
certain way, we're not really designed for that use, Like
(26:45):
like things like compressors, which is like a really you know,
in the old days, a big old piece of studio
equipment that was designed to even out the the loudness
of different things that were going over a broadcast signal.
But then some and figure out, oh, well, if I
use it wrong, or what if I crank this, you know,
the threshold up on or the peak reduction or whatever,
(27:06):
all of a sudden, then you're getting these really kind
of pumpy smashy sounds out of these things are like,
you know, the idea of delay that would be a
thing that in broadcast would be used so that things
could be happening on a delay. So if there's some
swear that goes out, you can pull it back um
or echo or whatever. Like there are these are artifacts
that that would have been at one point considered undesirable,
(27:28):
but then if you harness them and use them again
quote unquote wrong, you can get all kinds of new
things out of it. So I think this like kind
of falls in that category. Um, not exactly the same
because it wasn't intentional, uh misuse or intentional. It was
just sort of like capturing this like this happy accident.
And then you know, obviously do you think the guy
got paid? I like, like, uh, is this the same
(27:49):
as copyrighting a podcast? I wonder if the patentrols would
go after this guy because it seems pretty broad, like
like like the patent for podcasts was like a serialized
audio thing on a on a feed on on an
on demand feed. So the idea of like transmitting music
over the telephone. Surely this guy didn't just have own
(28:14):
own that concept, you know, lock Stock and Barrel. Well
he did for a while. Because tech patents are a
little bit of a different beast often, you know, like
the idea of clicking or a mouse or hitting an escape. Uh.
His patent was standing the test of time, just like
hopefully ridiculous history. Uh. This is this is the story.
(28:37):
I can't wait to hear. Everybody's favorite old music, ridiculous history.
It's your favorite hold music, the weirdest hold music, the
stuff you hate. Let us know. You can find us
on Facebook, where we are ridiculous Historians. We've also heard
you about the social media stuff, trying to get back
that back up and running. But in the meantime, we're
(28:59):
going to call it a day and we'll be back
later this week with another new piece, new to us,
piece of ridiculous history. In the meantime, I think our
very first and uh, very specialist thanks goes to our
audio specialist guest super producer for today, Torii Harris and
(29:21):
try Thank you so so much, tiny crowd, tiny crowd,
Uh yeah, yeah, huge, thanks for keeping the trains running
on time and pointing out the lawnmowers and leaf blowers
of the world where we're sorry in advance Monday morning thing.
Who are these people? I guess they Yeah, they gotta
feed their families do I hold no grudge against you
(29:42):
lawn mower and or a leafblower. Huge thanks also to
Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Uh super producer in absentia,
uh Max Williams, who I hope is enjoying a lovely
vacation right now, and Christopher Aciota is here in spirit.
And thanks of course to our own audio hold music
Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quister. Uh No, it
(30:06):
looks like we both got to make some calls. Good luck,
may fortune and the dial pad be ever in your favor.
Thank you so much, Ben, I appreciate it. Hopefully I
won't take another hour this time. I feel like i've already.
Is there sunk cost fallacy and staying on hold? You
know what I mean? Like exactly, Yeah, I think there
can be. It depends on what you're after, because there's
(30:28):
really no other way to get it. I've done it.
Uh yeah, I've done it a couple of times. But
I I have a great time if I if I
know I'm on hold, it's just a cognitive road trip basically.
So I'll pick up a book, I'll do some chores
I've been putting off. I might go and take a walk.
There are other worlds than these. We'll see you next time.
Fix For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the
(30:57):
i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or where ever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always
so much for tuning in. Let's give a big hand
to our guest producer today, the one and only Tari Harrison.
Uh no, uh oh, and I've been uh. You and
I are big Tary fans. Right, you're the crowd going
(00:48):
while I do. They're losing their minds man, and we
you know I am part of the crowd, so I
am also losing my mind over all. Right to answer
your previous question, yes, big big Tary Harrison fan. When
Tar is not class seen up Ridiculous History, she is
working on one of our favorite shows in the Ridiculous Universe.
That's ridiculous news. With our pals uh Mark and Bill.
(01:11):
You may recognize them from a previous appearance on this show.
That happened, right, yeah, no, that happened. We're in person.
I mean, the universe is pretty ridiculous. Who can keep
track of all the goings ons, the comings and goings
on of the Ridiculous Universe? But no, I do believe
you are correct, So didn't happen in like a in
then the Ridiculous Multiverse it was definitely in this ridiculous
(01:33):
universe that we occupy currently. That's true. It's all true, folks. Uh.
And you know, I like this statement about the universe
like thinking metaphysically, because this is a true story. A
few weeks ago, I had a dream where I was
talking to what I think was God, but I got
(01:56):
put on hold and I woke up convinced I had
heard this amazing music. And you know how it is
when your mind creates something in a dream. I spent
like twenty very blurry, not fully awake moments trying to
record the two night I had heard. Uh, and I'm
afraid to play it back, but just as uh, we
(02:17):
were getting on to record today, Uh, you had when
you came on, you were listening to real life, not
dream hold music. Yeah, man, I hold music is interesting
because it is a thing that's been around for a
long time. So folks have, um have the opportunity to
do a better job at it. Let's just say some
(02:37):
have taken that challenge and run with it. Uh and
and made you know, have very high fidelity hold music.
I've been on hold in my car before and I
literally heard like low end bumping, you know, on my
on my set, I don't even have like a fancy
system or anything in my car. But you know, with
the with the hands free, you know, connected, I was
hearing all kinds of low end fidelity and crisp hies
and mids and in that music. Uh, not the case
(02:59):
with the decay Have County Watershed, which is who I
was on hold with this morning. It's all staticky, uh
really broken up, very harsh, you know highs. It's just
like very unpleasant to listen to. Also stylistically all over
the place. I gotta say like it goes from like
something that sounds sort of like a sound alike the
Police song, like sort of a rock sand vibe, to
(03:21):
like Mendelssohn and then back again, all interspersed with a
very kindly voice telling me that the rates are going
up six percent, so super helpful. Didn't actually get a person,
That's why I was sharing this with you. I was
on hold for an hour, so uh, get your house
together to cab County Watershed. Your hold game um is
weak and your customer service is weaker. Yeah. I also
(03:45):
want to give a very special thanks to a musician
named Alex Cornell. I've i've mentioned this. I can't remember
it's on air off, but for many years, during one
iteration of our corporate overlords or another. Uh. This company
where where I have worked for more years than I
(04:06):
care to announce. Uh, this company had a hold song
that had lyrics and had a country vibe. It's called
I'm on Hold by Alex Cornell. I'm not gonna play it.
I don't think we should, but if you want to
stare into the void, folks, then journey with me and
(04:27):
Alex Cornell. There, Alex, I bear you no ill will.
It is not your faults. But after having been on
hold with your song for a number of years, for
egregiously long times, uh, it did break my mind a
little bit. If there is someone we need to thank
slash blame for this, well, it is not the water authorities.
(04:48):
It is not Alex Cornell. It's not even an elevator
operator back when those were a thing. It is a
man named Albert Levy, who in nineteen sixt you filed
a patent for something called a telephone hold program system.
Levy is the guy who invented the idea of listening
(05:12):
to something other than silence when you are waiting on Uh.
When you are waiting on a human to answer the
other end of the telephone. Uh. This really was the
idea of alleviating border I guess, or as he as
he puts it, occupying a collar. Yeah, it's neat. Um.
(05:36):
It's certainly in the days of you know, switchboards and
and um, you know of telef telefe telephone telephony being
much more of an all encompassing thing. If you weren't
on the telephone network, you weren't part of this world. Um. Now,
obviously with cell phones and computers and something like, it's
much less stress being put on that system and it's
almost becoming kind of a thing of the past. But yeah,
(05:58):
I mean the idea of, like, I mean, to wait
for a human to help you with your problem. Um,
why not give you a little something to occupy your
time with, or at the very least, you know, keep
you from hanging up, to encourage you to kind of
stick around. So what is the deal with the concept
of holding? Right? This is the definitely like something that
had to be kind of creative, the idea of being
put on hold. In twelve, the Sydney Morning Herald Um
(06:22):
reported on a man in Adelaide who was kept on
hold with an airline called Quantas for fifteen hours fifteen
hours and and this was not necessarily due to the
soothing tones of whatever you know, hold music was being
shows it, but it was apparently as a result of
a recorded message that you know, this is again part
(06:43):
of the irony of being on hold, this sort of
liminal kind of like um limbo space that we occupy.
This voice assuring the gentleman that customer Service AGA would
be with him quote soon. So you just stayed on.
I've been there, you know. Sometimes there there will be
a message saying in the times are longer than usual,
and so you can kind of mentally prepare, but you know,
you can have it on speaker and just do other stuff.
(07:06):
That's what he did. He was working and reading and
just waiting. And as he told the newspaper, quote I
wanted to find out exactly what they meant when they
said they would be with me as soon as possible.
So obviously this guy's kind of taking a stand for
the little guy. I appreciate that. Um. And and this
is you mentioned Ben thinking metaphysically earlier. This is ultimately
(07:28):
this idea of the whole space and what that occupies
in our minds and our lives. Is kind of a
philosophical or metaphysical question. Yeah, I like to call it
audio purgatory. That's really what what whole being on hold is. Also,
want to shout out Tom Vanderbilt over at Slate Rode
(07:50):
a roade a great article. We're pulling a lot of
this from called your Call is important to us. Uh.
What we may not know, especially if we're some of
our younger, ridiculous historians in the crowd, is that back
in the day, you had to be on hold just
to make a call. The first transatlantic telephone call occurred
(08:14):
from New York to Paris, and The New York Times
wrote about it in describing it like this, For those
who speak for the first time, there is no thrill
comparable to that which comes with the first signal. You know,
New York Hall is coming through. Hold the line, Wait
a minute. That minute is a thing of every mixed emotions.
One feels that something memorable should be spoken and can
(08:37):
think of nothing to say. So for early callers, you know,
you don't quite know if it's gonna go through. Your
sort of waiting in the wings to see if you're
part of the play will actually commence. And one thing
we didn't say about Levy. We'll put this in the
title to make up for it, folks. But one thing
(08:57):
we didn't say about our buddy Andrew Andy to his
friends is that he sort of accidentally invented this thing.
Originally he owned a factory. And no, it wasn't a
factory that made musac. It wasn't a factory that made telephones.
It was a factory that had a problem with its
(09:18):
own phone service. And this is where Tom Vanderbilt notes
over at Slate that a loose wire was touching a
steel girder, and the steel then was acting as an
antenna and was picking up a signal from a radio
station nearby. The wire tapped into the audio, and then
(09:38):
all of a sudden, when you were on hold calling
Levy's factory, instead of just hearing nothing but the hum
of the void, perhaps or some little clicks and audio ghost,
you would you would hear the station's broadcast. And Levy
didn't know about this until someone who had been on
hold told him, and he said, hey, uh, Andy, uh,
(10:03):
you know I'm calling about the Tuesday thing. I just
want you to know. The radio was playing when I'm
when I'm on hold, and uh, that's brilliant. You're a
smart guy. I'll order six more thinking about bobbers or
whatever it is you make at your factory widgets, you know,
do dads. So it's kind of interesting because you know,
(10:28):
we we already had music as a brand, you know,
kind of um getting trademarked in nineteen fifty four. Um,
and there I I guess that was sort of in
the zeitgeist. I mean, like you know, to your point,
Pamis was kind of done by a mistake, you know,
I mean, when I hear a bare wire touching a
metal girder, I'm glad nobody was killed. Instead, they just
(10:51):
got some like pleasant lilting you know tunes piped in,
you know, on the line. Um. But I do believe
there is some kind of parallel thinking going on here
because music is also, of course, this concept designed around
filling boredom in like you know, kind of procedural interactions
with music with something that kind of like make you
(11:12):
feel like you're not actually in some sort of hellish
liminal space. You know, God knows what when you'll ever
get out things like the d M V or or
in an elevator or what or what have you. This
was just taking it kind of into the virtual space.
And I guess if you think about it, telephones are really,
in many ways the first form of virtual communication where
you're not actually occupying the same space. Um. So yeah,
(11:34):
the the idea of the telephone hold program seems pretty um,
pretty innocuous on its surface, but it has really you know,
created an incredible legacy of of this thing and of
various iterations um and uh. You know again, it was
designed for a very specific purpose, and it all kind
of has its roots I guess the idea of being
(11:56):
put on hold in those earliest days of tele phone
communication the switchboard, where you would you know, call the
switchboard operator and say I'd like to place my call
to like you know, WHICHITA to five three or whatever
it would be, and I mean, like, ho, please, we'll
try the connection and you you could be on hold
for a while, and like you said, been this whole
idea of like what do I say when they come?
(12:17):
That's kind of where the idea of telephone etiquette came from, right,
the idea of saying hello or ahoihoi or whatever it
might be. You know, Yeah, and this whole. This whole
idea of being on hold and needing to fill that
with something um to kind of keep people from getting anxious.
Maybe hanging up came from these earliest days of telephone communication.
(12:38):
M hmm, yeah, you have. May you may have called,
for instance, the doctor's office and had the receptionists say, uh,
you know, uh, Dr Crinkleberries medical facility and crinkles. Also
we sell hold police because they're really busy and they
have to switch back and forth. This was happening with
(13:00):
literally every busy switchboard back in the day. And this
was exasperating to Levy, at least if you believe the
language of his patent, and we're not going to read
you the whole thing because like many patents, it's quite long.
But his entry to the patent office, which as he
said Curse in nineteen sixty two in Spring, says in
(13:22):
the course of receiving telephone calls, and it goes on
to talk about the dead silence, the collar has to
endure while operators are trying to chase down their parties.
And then you know what happens if an operator forgets
to check in again, what if they get busy? Uh,
the application has a key line here. In any event,
(13:43):
listening to a completely unresponsive instrument is tedious, and calls
are often abandoned altogether or remade, which leads to annoyance
and a waste of time and money. And so the
idea is that when you put them on hold, do
you just hit some sort of button that puts the
callers line on a source of program material, often music,
(14:08):
but it could really be anything. It could be a lawnmower,
it could be a cat yelling if you know, if
you are angry at the caller, uh. And the ideas
this would pacify them and maybe you know, now I
think about it in a time of high stress, the
idea was, maybe it'll give them a little chill room,
a little green room in the great performance of life.
(14:29):
And this idea, you know, it starts off with music,
but eventually someone realizes we can use this space, this
literally captive audience as people to advertise to. And so
by the nineties, companies began mixing music with messages. There
(14:50):
was one company we found called American Telephone Tapes that
would purposely find announcers with sultry voices to break into
the music every forty seconds or so, kind of like
a higher a higher cadence of the DJs that you
hear on radio today. Yeah, it's interesting because I mean,
(15:12):
you know the idea of advertising on these uh these
whole spaces. I don't referring to it so like like
uh mystically, but it really is kind of a space
you have to you have to kind of interact with it,
you know, like you know, you have to uh be
aware of it, you have to occupy it to some degree. Um.
But I think I don't I don't know that I've
ever heard like advertisements for like outside products, because I
(15:34):
think companies to these days are so aware that being
on hold is just the last place anyone wants to be.
And usually there are ways of of not having to
call and deal with a person, of of paying bills
or sorting out issues you know online. But I don't
know about you, Ben, but I sometimes for certain things
I really want to talk to a person. Um. Maybe
(15:57):
I'm old fashioned, but um what I will here if
not advertisements. I think people today maybe just wouldn't put
up with that on being on a really long hold
and then also feeling like you're being you know, shield
to buy other products and companies that are unrelated to
the the you know, service or or company that you're calling. Um,
there will be internal messages, you know, things like UM E,
(16:21):
T N D now has uh, you know, pay as
you go or whatever it might be, you know, and
that's gonna be a little more palatable. And if all
of a sudden, you know, you're hearing an advertisement for
some other thing, I think a lot of people would
be very cranky about that. Yeah, and it also could
make your business look bad. I mean, it doesn't make
your bank look particularly awesome if all of a sudden
(16:43):
they're having ads for you know, uh, chiropractors or something
in your area. So yeah, there was definitely a diminishing return.
And I agree with you. The vast majority of messages
you're gonna hear while you're on hold nowadays are going
to be internal advertisements, right, special offers from the company
(17:04):
that you are already calling. And that might be a
bit of a pickle for the folks who have to
answer the phone when they get through that phone queue.
Let me say this on behalf of everybody on the
planet who has ever worked in a call center. If
you have a problem with a company, if you are
very angry at a company. The person you are talking
(17:28):
to is not in charge of that decision. They will
do their best to help you, but they take a
lot of abuse from people who are just looking for
a punching bag. You don't have to be that person, folks.
You can be better than that. And I've had you know,
like anybody else, I've had a lot of conversations about
egregious or acrimonious things that a company has done. But
(17:51):
I always try to remember that person on the front
lines is not the CEO. They're not the person in
charge of whatever went wrong. They are there to help you,
and the best you can do to show that you
appreciate that help is not be an utter pill to them.
And uh, I hope getting some amends from people who
(18:13):
work in call centers or have worked in call centers.
It is a very tough job. I was working at
an insurance call center once upon a time when Hurricane
Katrina hit and it was just a horrific situation all around. Also,
if we could bring Levy back and tell him the
(18:36):
results of his invention, the results of his very forward
thinking accidentally discovered patent, I would say that he might
be surprised. A lot of people just don't like hold music.
Now they expect it, they don't like it, and just
like our caller over there in quantas, you know, eventually
(18:56):
you have to start questioning the absurdity of that canvass
bonds that's always like fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes as soon
as possible. I get the feeling most of the time
there isn't really a system in place that lets them
(19:17):
gauge like call volume. So I think it's all pretty canned,
like like in terms of like the expectation and um,
you know, I think some whold systems maybe a little
more robust than others, a little more like automated and
have computer you know, um intervention to some degree. I
think for the most part, it's kind of like we'll
get to you when we get to you here, enjoy this,
(19:37):
uh this little xylophone diddy and to to to get
you through and keep you from going insane or make
you go insane, because that's the thing about hold music too.
You're not gonna hear top forty jams or like the
radio because I imagine, um and then maybe maybe you
know this specifically that this is a consist is a
form of broadcast kind of. I mean, it's it's a
(19:58):
broadcast of well and I guess directly to you, but
it's happening, you know, in a lot of different iterations,
So you would have to own the copyright to the music,
which is why a lot of wold music it will
be the same thing over and over and over again
because the company is either you know, licensed this for
use in this way or possibly even you know, hired
(20:19):
somebody to do it for them to create this whole music. Uh,
perhaps it's some iteration of their theme, you know, tune
or whatever it might be, if it's a brand that
has you know, an associated jingle or something like that.
Or it'll be classical music, public domain music, and all
I have to do is license the recording um and
not and and pay any kind of any rights soldiers
for the actual compositions. Yeah. Yeah. It always reminds me
(20:44):
of an amazing bit from an amazing show called thirty Rock,
where wherein they want to make a biopic about Janice Joplin,
but they can't afford the rights, or they don't have
the rights to her, to her life story or or
her music, so they call her Janice Jorplin or something
(21:06):
like that, and they do nothing but parody lyrics of
of of famous Jannis Chopolin and the Heartbreaker songs. It
is amazing. I am going to pull up a clip
at some point if I get a break today. Uh,
you know it is true. Uh people also get this
(21:29):
sort of this weird relationship with Hold music. When you
hear it, often it becomes like a commercial jingle or
people start to love it at first ironically and then
an ironically, like me with Alex's I'm on Hold song again, Alex,
I don't know what our legality is here, so I
wish I could play it. But if you're hearing this
(21:51):
right in and let me know if it's okay to
play it, We'll end an episode with it one day.
And I'm glad that you mentioned the idea of having
a relationship with this these bits of themera that are
kind of meant to be pretty disposable. Um that there
are communities even that come up around like being obsessed
with a particular brand of Hold music, or say, like
you know, Walmart Music, you know from throughout the years,
(22:13):
like you can actually get tapes and recordings of like
all of that stuff and people like remix them and
do all kinds of crazy stuff. But um, there is
a really interesting story behind the generic hold music from
the tech company Cisco. UM. Cisco, who you know, installs
and maintains like corporate telephone systems, and apparently they're there
(22:34):
to this day, I believe, at least as of this article.
In so they may have changed it. I can't speak
to I haven't been on holding on a Cisco system
UH in recent years, but there is a piece of
music that they have used. Um Ira Glass actually did
an episode of This American Life that was composed by
an I T guy UM that you probably haven't heard of,
(22:55):
by the name of Tim Carlton UM. This article from
The Atlantic by extas c Magical describes him as a
mostly unnoogle able UM I T guy Tim Carlton UH
And in fact, on the Atlantic article they posted a
YouTube clip of the piece of music, and it has
been removed due to a copyright claim by Tim Carlton.
(23:19):
So he's got skin in the game when it comes
to this. But he had a buddy named Derek Deal
who went to work for Cisco, and he heard one
of his little ditties that he had recorded on a
four track and was like, this is it, this is
the one, this is this is gonna this has got
to be the the cisco Hold music. Um. And eventually
it did go on to become the cisco Hold music
and um, you know, was heard by millions. Not exactly
(23:42):
the way I would consider people thinking about breaking into
the industry or becoming a star, but you can't deny
that this dude's tune has been heard by millions of people.
And there has been almost a little community that has
developed around it, with people remixing it, recording their own versions,
posting things on you Tube, and all of that stuff.
(24:02):
It's fascinating. Yeah, And speaking of fascinating and gratitude, iowa
big thanks to Sophie Hagney. I just found this MPR article,
Like I just found it as we were as we
were recording, I was thinking about that relationship too, and
I was thinking about you, Alex Cornell, my favorite paras
(24:22):
social relationship that I have. There's an MPR article about
Alex and about the I'm on Hold song. It was
for Uber conference. It's selected by nine out of ten
call organizers, or at least it was as of it
plays a million times a month. And this comes directly
from Craig Walker, the CEO of dial Pad, the company
(24:45):
that owns uber Conference, which was a phone line that
we used a lot for work back in the day.
Alex Cornell is not a working musician, man. This is
I'm on Hold is the only song he's ever written
because he was a co founder of uber Conference and
he wanted to have better hold music. Holy smokes, hold
(25:08):
e smokes. I should say uh this yeah, right, Nope,
on left behind. So we see that there is an
entire You could rightly call this a genre, right if
you think about how many people listen to it on
a daily basis, then hold music hits a lot of ears.
And I didn't know this either, man, but apparently there
(25:33):
is a thing called a comfort tone that companies might
transmit even when you think you're just silently on hold
for a moment, which is when the maybe the person
at the call center hits the mute button and you
think you're on hold. They can still hear you if
you're you know, like cursing to yourself or having another
conversation anyway. A comfort tone is a barely audible synthetic
(25:56):
noise that signals a connection is still there, very like
a hug from a ghost for your ears. It's a
weird way to put it, but hold music itself is
a weird thing. And uh, you know, no, this might
be a shorter one for us today, but I remain
astounded that the guy who patented telephone holds music did
(26:22):
it because of an accident. You know, the history of
communications and technology, they're often happy accidents, you know. I
talked about this um with folks that I record music with.
For example, like a lot of studio equipment and things
that that have have grown to become used in a
certain way, we're not really designed for that use, Like
(26:45):
like things like compressors, which is like a really you know,
in the old days, a big old piece of studio
equipment that was designed to even out the the loudness
of different things that were going over a broadcast signal.
But then some and figure out, oh, well, if I
use it wrong, or what if I crank this, you know,
the threshold up on or the peak reduction or whatever,
(27:06):
all of a sudden, then you're getting these really kind
of pumpy smashy sounds out of these things are like,
you know, the idea of delay that would be a
thing that in broadcast would be used so that things
could be happening on a delay. So if there's some
swear that goes out, you can pull it back um
or echo or whatever. Like there are these are artifacts
that that would have been at one point considered undesirable,
(27:28):
but then if you harness them and use them again
quote unquote wrong, you can get all kinds of new
things out of it. So I think this like kind
of falls in that category. Um, not exactly the same
because it wasn't intentional, uh misuse or intentional. It was
just sort of like capturing this like this happy accident.
And then you know, obviously do you think the guy
got paid? I like, like, uh, is this the same
(27:49):
as copyrighting a podcast? I wonder if the patentrols would
go after this guy because it seems pretty broad, like
like like the patent for podcasts was like a serialized
audio thing on a on a feed on on an
on demand feed. So the idea of like transmitting music
over the telephone. Surely this guy didn't just have own
(28:14):
own that concept, you know, lock Stock and Barrel. Well
he did for a while. Because tech patents are a
little bit of a different beast often, you know, like
the idea of clicking or a mouse or hitting an escape. Uh.
His patent was standing the test of time, just like
hopefully ridiculous history. Uh. This is this is the story.
(28:37):
I can't wait to hear. Everybody's favorite old music, ridiculous history.
It's your favorite hold music, the weirdest hold music, the
stuff you hate. Let us know. You can find us
on Facebook, where we are ridiculous Historians. We've also heard
you about the social media stuff, trying to get back
that back up and running. But in the meantime, we're
(28:59):
going to call it a day and we'll be back
later this week with another new piece, new to us,
piece of ridiculous history. In the meantime, I think our
very first and uh, very specialist thanks goes to our
audio specialist guest super producer for today, Torii Harris and
(29:21):
try Thank you so so much, tiny crowd, tiny crowd,
Uh yeah, yeah, huge, thanks for keeping the trains running
on time and pointing out the lawnmowers and leaf blowers
of the world where we're sorry in advance Monday morning thing.
Who are these people? I guess they Yeah, they gotta
feed their families do I hold no grudge against you
(29:42):
lawn mower and or a leafblower. Huge thanks also to
Alex Williams, who composed our theme. Uh super producer in absentia,
uh Max Williams, who I hope is enjoying a lovely
vacation right now, and Christopher Aciota is here in spirit.
And thanks of course to our own audio hold music
Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quister. Uh No, it
(30:06):
looks like we both got to make some calls. Good luck,
may fortune and the dial pad be ever in your favor.
Thank you so much, Ben, I appreciate it. Hopefully I
won't take another hour this time. I feel like i've already.
Is there sunk cost fallacy and staying on hold? You
know what I mean? Like exactly, Yeah, I think there
can be. It depends on what you're after, because there's
(30:28):
really no other way to get it. I've done it.
Uh yeah, I've done it a couple of times. But
I I have a great time if I if I
know I'm on hold, it's just a cognitive road trip basically.
So I'll pick up a book, I'll do some chores
I've been putting off. I might go and take a walk.
There are other worlds than these. We'll see you next time.
Fix For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the
(30:57):
i heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or where ever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.