If they were truthful, they'd probably always be saying, "please hold for 3 hours, 17 minutes, 49 seconds, and 8 milliseconds."

I could just imagine this being a vine

I actually LOVE hold music, elevator music and lounge music. It's so calming!

Or, " We are experiencing a extremely high volume of phone calls today, please hang up and try your call again later, or please stay on the line and you call will be taken in which the order it was received!!!!!" OP I have done the same thing many times!! It is incredibly frustrating but becomes a game of patients and staying on hold for spite at that point. And it gets even more frustrating when you get finally get someone and either you can not understand a God Damn word they are saying or are a complete and utter miserable, mean, BITCH to you!!!

#4 OVER 9000

So many times I could recite it exactly when I knew it was going to come on, down to the slight stutter the guy that recorded it had. xD

One of my friends works at a call center, and I promise you- they (employees, not just my friend) use the "hold" thing to take smoke breaks or play video games until the customer hangs up all the time lol

Not at all of them though. I've worked at a few call centers and my experience is that the employees hate it as much as the customers when there's such a long line. First of all a decent customer SERVICE employee feels for a customer when they've had to wait this long and on top of that, they get angry customers (understandably). They can't help that their boss is too cheap to hire/schedule more personnel and can apologise to the customer all they want and mean it, but of course that doesn't help the customer.

I take calls for AppleCare Technical Support and it's all queue-based. We have to take the call otherwise it's considered 'call avoidance.' Sorry to hear that your friend doesn't work for a company that cares about customer service, #39.

Sometimes it's really that busy at a call center.

*any company

I called a company who put me on hold then asked for my number to call back so I didn't have to wait on the line. They got back to me pretty quickly. Maybe all companies should try it.

Microsoft does that if you call the help desk

There are people who speak good English despite the fact that it's their third language... I don't see the problem.

Just as there are people whose English is horrid even when it's their only language.

mm I don't know why people who speak English as anything other than their first language get bashed so much, the standard of literacy in English as a first language is often horrifying...

Because most of the time it is because they outsource tech support to India because they can pay them less to do the same job which is aggravating because there are many Americans without a job that would gladly do the job

Unfortunately technical support and customer service reps who work in jobs outsourced to other countries are often not actually given the training they need to be able to understand and resolve situations. Also, for technical support, if either the customer or the tech does not speak English well, trying to explain issues can become nearly impossible, especially when you add in that many people don't understand technical terminology even if it's in their native language. Trying to explain an address bar, Web browser, or, god forbid, how to access a modem, when the 2 people on the call do not speak the same language makes a difficult experience nearly impossible. source: 3 years of American based call center tech support to pay for college

Riiight, because being a dick to the minimum wage call-center guys (who are just the bottom of the food chain and are not responsible in the least for the fact that their bosses prefer overworking them and keeping you on hold instead of hiring more people) and wasting their time (thus keeping the other customers even more time on hold) would have totally solved your problem...

Not only that...sometimes customers who are dumb waste tons of time of customer service agents making others who have a real problem sit on hold

I don't know about the people you've met who work for a call center #20, but I make over $4 more than minimum wage in my state (and the U.S. in general) and my job is damned prestigious. And I work from home.