13/07/2014

Have a listen to this.

Is it the worst operator waiting music you’ve ever heard? Be honest. I know there's some bad stuff out there, but surely this has to top everything. To start with, most companies have a selection of songs which play one after another, so you’ll never end up overly bored or aurally offended for more than a few minutes. This company isn’t doing itself any favours by picking one section of one song, and looping it every 45 seconds. But given that they’ve gone with that baffling decision, they could at the very least pick a song which has some interesting chord variation, and is more or less comprehensible.

Nope. It’s the grinding country & western 1-2-3-1 progression which makes just about everyone (the exception being my grandmother, who loves this stuff) want to swear off music entirely. For one thing, there can never be any excuses for playing a harmonica in its upper range over a low quality phone line. But things get worse before they get better, as the harmonica intro gives way to twang-filled singing which proves even more unbearable, sometimes actively painful (see 00:13). The singer seems to be going after the basically-happy-but-a-bit-pathetic image, which is fine if you’re into that, but also slightly depressing to listen to non-stop on a Sunday afternoon while you’re waiting for someone to help you fix your malfunctioning Internet.

Did I mention that was the reason for my call? The ulterior motive of this post is to explain my lack of blog entries in the last few days – my Internet has been absolutely hopeless, and as I write I’m still unsure when I’ll next get it back. I think only something as crucial to life as Internet could have permitted me to put up with that bloody song for almost forty minutes, as I waited for a FONIC service operator to tell me what to do.

Though perhaps the song’s message is meant to help put things in perspective for ill-tempered callers like me. “All that I want, is I want, is my house”, the song’s opening words wail*. “A failed Internet connection isn’t going to lose you your house”, FONIC seems to be saying, “or at least, not directly. And plenty of people out there, like this singer guy, find that a house is all they really need to be happy. Maybe it’s all you need too! So why are you getting so bothered about our shit Internet?” “Oh yeah”, I say in response, “Internet isn’t everything, what a fool I’ve been. I’ll now be much more understanding with the service operator, or maybe I’ll hang up immediately and frolic in a nearby meadow for a bit.”

Well, no. That's not what we think. We just end up getting a bit annoyed at this happy-go-lucky yokel singing to us from his incomprehensible world of untainted Internet-less contentment (curse him). It’s an awful song, and I daresay the result of some FONIC office dare.

But I acknowledge that my opinions on this subject may not represent those of the average person. That’s because my idea of a good piece of telephone operator music is the following:

Preferably with the operator actually answering just as the drop approaches – that way the disappointment of missing it quickly dissipates with the realisation that you’ve finally got through to someone. Exquisite! But that’s just me.

*I think. Some of them resist comprehension, even after fifty listens.