How I wish we could be spared the endless hell of hold music

‘Dah, dahdah, dah dahdahdahdah DAH! Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold and an operator will be with you shortly…” Ah, the familiar sound of Eine

kleine Nachtmusik being tortured to death at the end of a tinny telephone line. See also Vivaldi’s Four

Seasons, Ravel’s Bolero and assorted Strauss waltzes. Not to mention the auditory Polyfilla mendaciously known as “easy listening”.

Does anyone really feel more warmly towards companies who decline to pick up their phones because they have been subjected, during the interminable wait for their call to be answered, to the musical equivalent of navel fluff? Someone must, for there are reams of market research extolling the “positive effects on customer retention” of the right sort of hold music. Songs such as The Beatles’

Help are best avoided, apparently, because they remind irked customers that they aren’t getting any. Still, “whatever you do,” an apologist of hold music urges, “it’s best not to let your callers opt for silence.”

Most of us grimly endure this aural pollution – because what else can we do, if we need to have a conversation with a company representative? But Dr Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, could bear the hold music of the US pharmacy chain CVS no longer. Aged 52, he calculated that he had spent “25 days out of my 18,980 days on this planet listening to that… piece”. Enough, he decided, was enough. “Please change your hold music,” he begged CVS. “I hear it in my sleep. I hear it when I go running. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night humming that melody. It haunts me, day and night. It’s not healthy. I know. I’m a doctor.”

His plea ignited a national debate on the virtues of the offending tune – a glutinous piano track generally identified as The

Golden Dragon by Karl King (though other attributions exist). He even ended up humming it on Good

Morning America. After keeping him on hold for a good long time, CVS finally responded last week with a statement that the company intends to “enhance” its phone system, including the hold music. Its plans, it stressed, were unrelated to Dr Schlozman’s grand remonstrance.

The Golden Dragon may be vanquished, for now. But note that weasel word, “enhance”. We can all expect to spend many more hours of our lives being tormented by telephonic earworms before the dragon of hold music is finally slain.

I was listening to Radio 4’s PM programme a while ago when the piercingly genteel accents of another era filled the airwaves: Dame Barbara Cartland was extolling the health-giving virtues of honey in an old interview clip. Not generally inclined to take advice on nutritional matters from defunct romantic novelists, I somehow found myself obediently replacing sugar with honey.

Now letters released by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation show that the Dame pressed her healthgiving potions on Mrs Thatcher during her premiership. The then prime minister received the “nutrimental capsules” with gratitude, though it isn’t clear whether she took them. Still, while everyone around me was coughing like an ailing Brontë sister, I survived this winter without so much as a sniffle – and with a growing respect for the Dame’s health tips from beyond the grave.