The IRS phone dirge puts my life on hold
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Version 0 of 1. There is a big tax deadline in the US this week, when everyone who deferred filing earlier in the year faces the final due date. As a result, if you need to call the IRS – the Internal Revenue Service – you face an automated message informing you that the waiting time is “longer than 60 minutes”. This is its toe-in-the-water way of preparing you for the fact that the waiting time is actually 110 minutes. I know this, because I rang the IRS four times in two days. That’s almost eight hours of being on hold, an entire working day, during which the background to my life was a musical dirge punctuated every 10 minutes with the update: “Our representatives are still helping other customers. Please continue to hold.” Related: The $42 phone call: IRS budget cuts mean half of taxpayers will be ignored In the 1980s and early 90s, research into the psychology of those waiting on hold determined that consumers would feel less abandoned – less anxious that the call had been dropped, or that the wait might go on for ever – if music was piped down the phone. Ever since, debate has raged (well, simmered) around what type of music makes time pass most quickly: upbeat, soothing, big hits or muzak. Amazingly, there is an On Hold Messaging Association for the discussion and celebration of all this, which sounds as joyful as an association for celebrating holes in the road. Playing familiar music might make a caller initially happier, but it might also slow down the perceived passage of time as the caller marks the beginning and end of each song cycle. In studies, popular music increased the likelihood of callers hanging up. Hence the dirge, the musical equivalent of being lost in light mist, unthreatening at first but gradually chilling the skin, seeping into the bones and killing your mood more decisively than a short, sharp shower. With the advent of the speaker phone, some of the agony of waiting has lessened; one can work or make lunch. But you are never quite off the hook. Being on hold is like metaphysical punishment, a forced period in which to consider your life as a finite stack of minutes, slowly shuffling off the pile while you futz around, waiting for someone to pick up and help you. Eventually, they do pick up. They tell you you’ve come through to the wrong department and need to hang up and call again. Lincoln leisure To alleviate the stress, I walked round the corner to the best library in New York, the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center. The chairs there are amazing. It’s worth a trip uptown just for the back support. It also has huge windows and high ceilings, and a modern air that is a long way away from the mould-and-plastic-bag aspect of a lot of old libraries. The chairs are amazing. It’s worth a trip uptown just for the back support Lincoln Center is New York’s closest equivalent to the National Theatre complex, arranged around a fountain and with a lot of space to loiter and walls to sit on – this in a corner of the city where, if you wait too long to cross the street, someone will think of a way to charge you five dollars. I interviewed the architect Renzo Piano once, and he told me the definition of a truly successful public area was a “space with no function”. That way, he said, “you can just wait and see and enjoy”. And so I sat, and waited, and enjoyed not being sold anything more than the afternoon air. Romantic history The National Book Awards longlist for nonfiction came out in the US this week. Some of the titles amused me. I’m sure Cynthia Barnett’s Rain: A Natural and Cultural History is terrific, but after salt, cod, cotton, pepper, sugar and bananas have all had the same treatment, that formulation seems tired. And I can’t read a title like Martha Hodes’ Mourning Lincoln without thinking of the history book-turned-romcom a friend and I are always threatening to write. Another eight hours on hold and Becoming Hitler could get closer to reality. |