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Show Short Cummings By KEVIN CUMMINGS There ore olternotives to xelevotor' music Last week I had to call an airline to get some information. The phone rang once, I heard a click, and a voice said, "Thank-you for calling Planetary Airlines. Ail of our agents are busy right now. Your call will be taken by the next available agent." Before I had a chance to react, I was listening to elevator music. Elevator music is created in special studios staffed entirely by tone-deaf musicians. These highly trained professionals take a song and strip away anything that made it worth listening to. In the world of elevator music, Madonna sounds exactly like Montavani. I think that elevator music is a sort of test Only people who really and truly want to talk to somebody will wait if they're forced to listen to elevator music. 4 After listening to a violin medley of Rolling Stones songs for half an hour, I was pounding my head on my desk in time with the music. Every two minutes a cheerful, recorded voice came on to assure me that "all of our agents are still busy." It also asked me to "Please continue to hold the line." The worst part of being on "ignore" is the fear. I'm constantly afraid that if I hang up I would have been the next person they talked to. Every second I think, "Should I hang up or not?" Then I think, "I've been holding a long time. Someone is bound to talk to me any second and if I hang up I'll have to start at the beginning of the line again." This kind of reasoning keeps me on the line for hours. It's about then that I begin to hallucinate. I see all the airline's agents huddled around the phone taking bets on how long I'll stay on the line. "Five hours and forty-two minutes!" one of them shouts. ' "That almost beats the record of six hours!" It wouldn't be so bad if they gave you something to do while I was waiting. I had some time to think about this recently, and I've come up with a couple of ideas. I'd like to see them start a game called Telephone Jeopardy. They could hire a cheerful announcer to come on the line and play Jeopardy with the people on hold. The announcer an-nouncer would read an answer like, "The name of the president who was in office when you were put on hold." The first one to "ring-in" by pressing "O" would get to take a stab at the question. "Who was Kennedy?" they'd ask. People who answered correctly would be allowed to talk to a human being. Losers would be cut off and would have to call back. I also like the idea of a "touch-tone "touch-tone play-along." The buttons on a touch-tone telephone give you 12 different notes. A recording could teach you how to play different songs. For example, they could teach you to play "Satisfaction" in time to the elevator music. If you got really good, they could let you give little concerts for the other people on hold. Most of all, I'd really like to be able to talk to the other people on hold. We could plan to torture the operators by playing songs on our phones if we ever got through. I liked my ideas so well that I called AT&T to see what they thought. I never did get to talk to anyone, though. They put me on hold. M |