Life on Hold Should Be Fate of Everyone Who Cuts In

Ken Green of Claremont complains that he doesn’t like it when someone cuts into a line in front of him. However, this is a form of me-firstism that can usually be dealt with by rude remarks or shoving.

He is more annoyed, Green says, by an electronic kind of cutting-in. “People are cutting into line in front of me all the time, and I have difficulty in preventing it. The way they do it is to dial the telephone.”

For example, Green recalls that he recently went into a department store to buy some window shades. While a clerk was helping him her phone rang. She spent the next 10 minutes talking to the customer on the phone while Green cooled his heels.

“This happens all the time,” he says. “I have visited the following people in person during the last few months and had my conversations interrupted by the telephone: a loan officer at a bank, a tax consultant, a doctor, store clerks too numerous to mention and a barber.”

Surely there are few of us who have not encountered this form of cutting in. One has gone to the trouble of dressing and driving to the store, only to give up his place to someone who is calling from his living room chair.

Of course it can also be frustrating for the person calling in if he is put on hold. It seems only fair that he should have to wait, rather than the person who has actually turned up in the store. However, I can sympathize with anyone who has been put on hold and had music piped into his ear.

The kind of music that is played for people on hold is not really music, but a kind of audio pap, like the Muzak played in elevators. It wouldn’t be so bad being kept on hold if one could listen to the Light Horse Cavalry Overture or something by the Ink Spots.

I encountered a new wrinkle in telephonic technology the other day when a woman from my cardiologist’s office called to tell me that I was to go to Huntington Memorial Hospital for a test. I asked her when and where to go and she said just a minute, she’d put me on hold while she called the hospital. A minute later she reentered the line to tell me that she had called the hospital but the hospital had put her on hold. She asked me to stay on hold until the hospital got back to her.

So there we were, a three-way hookup, two of us on hold. Theoretically, it would be possible to extend that until five or six people were all on hold.

Anyone who has ever called a government bureaucracy, or any kind of bureaucracy, has encountered the multiple-choice response. First a voice tells you you have reached the number you dialed, which is a good start. Then you are told that if you want this department press 1, or if you want that department press 2 and so on, up to seven or eight choices. Finally, if you don’t know what you want, dial yet another number, and someone will answer you. Usually, you end up being put on hold.

A common menace is the person or persons who cut into the food line at cocktail parties. They usually do it in pairs--man and wife. They simply walk up to the couple in front of you and say, “Hello there! How are you?” They then begin chatting with the couple in line until they themselves have reached the head of the line, whereupon they unself-consciously begin piling food on their plates.

It is done so surreptitiously that the persons being cheated can’t do or say anything without being thought gauche.

When I was in the Marine Corps it was thought bad manners indeed to intercept any food on its way down the table to someone who had called for it. For instance, if I said “Pass the butter, please” and someone down the table started the butter on its way, it was forbidden for any man on the route to take some butter as it passed. This was known as “short stopping.” The punishment for short stopping was a sharp rap across the back of the hand with a table knife. It was administered, as a matter of duty, by the one of the men sitting on either side of the culprit.

I always thought this custom an unusual refinement for Marines. However, when men whose occupations are inevitably brutal live together in close quarters, certain rules of etiquette must be observed to keep them from reverting to the Stone Age.

Unfortunately, our technology precludes any such simple and direct solution. We are doomed to spend a part of our lives on hold.