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How to deal with holding phone calls? (quokk.au)
submitted 1 day ago by AloneDownUnder@quokk.au to c/autism@lemmy.world
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So obviously from time to time you have to call some service (especially in australia where so many digital systems seem to break often, so you have to call customer service)

But how to deal with waiting on the phone?
The wait is sometimes up to 30 minutes, and it will play this horrendous music.
If I turn the volume down, I will forget I was calling or won't notice quickly enough and the people will hang up before I can grab my phone.
If I keep the volume up, it's so distracting that I can't do anything else and I'm basically waiting for 30 minutes staring at my phone.

Anyone else that experiences this? How to deal with it?

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[-] bunnyBoy@pawb.social 3 points 1 day ago

So I work in a call center and am frequently on the other side of this exchange. In a lot of cases, you can request to be on hold with no music! They play music on those lines as a way of letting the caller know that the representative can't hear you right now. If you ask 'Instead of placing me on hold, can you just mute yourself while you work because the music bothers me?' 90% of the time they'll do just that, since having people on hold is bad for their metrics.

This won't work in situations where the representative needs to call someone and speak to them on a separate line as the system is always going to play music on an inactive line, but in those instances you can request they merge the call so you're on the same line with them!

Either way, most places are going to have a phone system that can get around the annoying music, and if you ask politely, most reps are going to be fine with trying to spare you the music. Hope this helps :)

[-] AloneDownUnder@quokk.au 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, i did notice that some places when put on hold don't have waiting music.

But what I'm talking about is usually at the beginning of a call, where you just pressed some buttons to be put in the queue. Then you have music and didn't talk to anybody yet, so no option to ask for no music.

Ideally it would be put into law that for accessibility all these phone systems should offer the option to turn off the music at the beginning.

this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
19 points (95.2% liked)

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