Intro - female corporate voice, phone-filtered, sweet] Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line. You are number….. two hundred sixty seven in the queue [Hook - call and response, female first, male deadpan flat underneath] Your call is important to us — no one said that Please continue to hold — I am. Your call is important to us — I’m gonna stab my eye with a pencil. [Verse 1 Male Only) Forty minutes deep in a hallway with no doors. Same eight bars of saxophone, working overtime it never got paid for. A woman who does not exist keeps apologizing for a delay she was recorded regretting in advance. That's the part that gets me — the sorry was pre-written. They knew. They budgeted for my afternoon before I lost it. I have a case number. A number they assigned to a thing they have no intention of opening. [Female Voice] Press one for English. Press two to repeat these options. Press two to repeat these options. [Hook - call and response, female first, male deadpan flat underneath] Your call is important to us — how do I get this pencil out of my eye? Please continue to hold — I think I’m gonna die. [Verse 2 Male voice only] Transferred to a department that closed in twenty-nineteen and somehow still has a ringtone. Estimated wait: fourteen minutes. That was ninety minutes ago. The number has never gone down. It's only gotten more confident. "Unusually high call volume" — unusual now for six straight years. At some point unusual is just the business model. And they are not understaffed. They are staffed exactly right for the number of people who give up. Somebody ran my patience through a spreadsheet and found it cheaper than a person. A human costs money every hour. A recording costs money once. [Hook - call and response, female first, male deadpan flat underneath] Your call is important to us — Give me cancer. [Verse 3 - Male only - double time, escalating to triple time, rapid-fire] I'm holding for the refund for the charge for the plan I cancelled in November and got billed for in December, holding for the claim for the letter for the check they swear on everything already left the building, holding for the landlord for the deposit for the place I left cleaner than the day they handed me the key, holding for the airline for the bag with the suit for the funeral that went ahead and happened without me, holding for a voice — any voice — that isn't a recording of a voice apologizing for the absence of a voice, and it lands on me somewhere around hour two that the holding IS the product, the waiting is the thing they sell, I'm not in line for the service — I am the service. Working a shift I never applied for. For a company that will never learn my name. [Break - music drops out completely Female voice] We're sorry. Due to unusually high call volume — [SFX: click] [Male Voice - deadpan, dry, no music ) ...Hello? If I stay on this call much longer I’ll be collecting social security…. [Female corporate voice, sweet, alone in the room] Your call is important to us.
