Hold music
The line is answered by not being answered. A click, half a second of nothing, and then a string arrangement of something that was a song once, arriving down a pipe built for the human voice — three hundred hertz at the bottom, three and a half thousand at the top, everything above and below thrown away before it left the building. No bass. No air. Music that has been through the same tube as a cough.
Stand in a queue at a bank and the queue tells you about itself. You can count heads. You can see the man at the front taking documents out of a folder one at a time, and you know to within about four minutes what that folder is going to cost you. A physical queue publishes its own length continuously and for free; that is most of what makes it bearable. The phone queue publishes nothing. No number, no faces, no front, no way to tell a two-minute wait from a forty-minute one, and — this is the part that does the damage — no way to tell either of them from a call that has already died.
Hence the music. It is not there to entertain you and never has been; nobody in the history of the telephone has been entertained. Silence on a line is indistinguishable from a dead line, so a silent queue empties itself: every caller hangs up within twenty seconds to check, redials, and rejoins at the back, and the system chews its own tail. The music is a continuous demonstration that the connection is still standing. Its content is irrelevant to that job, which is exactly why it is permitted to be, and reliably is, terrible.
You learn the loop without ever agreeing to learn it. Somewhere in the fourth minute a phrase comes round that you have met before, and the recognition is unpleasant in a very particular way, because it is not musical recognition. It is a measurement. This is how long I have been here, times some number I did not want to know. The loop becomes a clock, and a short loop is a clock with a fast hand.
Then the voice cuts in over the top — mid-bar, always mid-bar, never at the end of a phrase — to say that your call is important. For the first fifth of a second the body reacts as though a person has picked up: the shoulders, the intake of breath, the mouth already arranging itself around hello, yes, hi. Then the sentence resolves into a recording and the body puts itself away again, slightly embarrassed. This happens on the fifth interruption as faithfully as on the first. Whatever in us listens for a human voice cannot be told, and does not learn.
The proof of what you were really listening to arrives when it drops out. Two seconds of clean silence — a handover between systems, nothing more — and the phone is hard against your ear and you are saying hello? into it. You had not attended to a single bar of that music. You could not name the instrument. You would not recognise it tomorrow. And you caught its absence inside one beat, because it was never the music you were monitoring. You were monitoring the fact of it, the way you monitor an engine you are not listening to.
Some systems now tell you where you are — you are caller number six — and the queue can see itself again, a little. But the music keeps going underneath the announcement, and it has to, because a number is only true at the moment it is spoken and the music is true continuously. It is the only music most people will ever hear whose entire content is that it has not stopped.
Thread: the falling edge