Please Hold

A couple of years ago I began working at a job where I have the coveted opportunity to spend extended time on call hold, waiting for representatives to research, check with help desk, escalate, and call a task force together to work on problems with insurance claims. Exciting, no? Thankfully this is not the sole aspect of my job or I would have been carted out in a straitjacket on day three.

Instead, I began categorizing the different types of hold music. At first it was simple. "Plucky 80s Sitcom Theme Song." Followed by "Groovy 70s Law Enforcement Action Drama." Funny enough, "Cheesy Porn-Stache Scene" was actually one of the categories. The most specific I got was "Background Synthesizer From Nestle Alpine White Commercial Circa 1986."

Until now.

Friends, I bring you "Stories From the Void."

Tuesday Morning:
This hold music sounds like a heartfelt teen movie from the late 70s where a city girl moves to the country to live with her aunt and uncle after her parents die in a car accident and she gives them all sorts of trouble at first because she's acting out in grief but then she falls in love with their horse Stanley so she sets to caring for him and it changes her life so she ends up becoming a successful veterinarian. Specifically, this is the music that is playing when she goes back to the farm to say goodbye to Stanley when he dies, and they play a poignant montage of scenes of her as a teenager caring for him and riding him and grooming him and you can practically hear her broken teen heart healing but her adult heart breaking again for the loss of her beloved Stanley. Oh Stanley! I love you so much! You made me who I am today!

Tuesday Afternoon:
80s rom-com starring post-Tootsie but pre-Rain Man Dustin Hoffman as the sad underdog who pines for a gorgeous, high-maintenance woman who barely looks his way initially but then eventually falls for his charm. This is the music that they play when she realizes that she's falling in love with him, but before her controlling ex-husband comes back into the picture and takes her attention away from sad underdog for a brief period until he does something so awful (but sanitary awful like making a hateful comment about the sad underdogs of the world accompanied by skeptical scoffing, not actually awful like filleting her skin and serving it to her during the Super Bowl) that she remembers how much she loves sad underdog and goes back to him.