Just Wait Until You Get to the End of This Story

This music is driving you nuts. It’s so cheerful, it’s depressing. It’s so bland, it’s offensive. Suddenly it stops and you get excited: Could this be an actual human?

No, it’s just that upbeat On-Hold Man again.

“Thank you for continuing to hold,” he says. “While we do have an unusually high call volume at this time, we value your call. Please hold for the next available associate.”

You’ve heard this message so many times, you’ve memorized it. You hate On-Hold Man. You want to strangle him just to hear his upbeat voice gurgle and sputter and beg for mercy.

You’re getting surly. You’ve been waiting for the repairman all day. The company promised he’d be here between 9 and 12, and now it’s almost 3 and you’ve called to find out what happened. But before you could even ask the question, you’re put on hold.

Now that music is back again. It’s supposed to be soothing, but you’re not soothed. You’re seething.

“Thank you for continuing to hold. While we do have an unusually high call volume at this time, we value your call. . . .”

“Then answer it,” you scream.

”. . . Hold for the next available associate.”

You curse. You rage. But what’s the use? You sigh and settle into the quiet desperation of waiting. Foolishly, you begin to contemplate how much of your life has been spent waiting.

Waiting at the post office, where the clerks seem to move in slow motion. Or at the supermarket, where everybody in the 10-items-or-less line is shooting death-ray glances at the guy with 12 items.

Or waiting at McDonald’s, where you always choose the slowest line, the one behind the people who freeze when confronted with the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Or waiting for elevators that seem to have gone AWOL while you jab idiotically at the already-illuminated button, knowing it won’t do any good.

Or waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles, a place so notorious for mind-numbing, soul-crushing torpor that the mere mention of its name brings a shudder.

“Waiting is an insult to us,” says anthropologist David Murray. “We feel we’re being put down when we’re forced to wait. We sense that we’ve been disrespected; hence, the anger.”

*

Americans don’t wait patiently. We are a busy people. We have day planners and lists of Things to Do Today. We’re highly caffeinated, and we expect life to be full of action, bing, bang, boom. We see waiting as time taken from life, Murray says, while other cultures see it as a part of life.

“We feel we are living only during an event--the rest of the time we’re hibernating,” he says. “It’s a particularly American or Western attitude. In nonindustrial tribal societies, the rhythms are slower and waiting is part of life. In the absence of clocks and hard-and-fast punctual expectations, it’s hard to be frustrated by waiting.”

Several years ago, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski was stuck in a Siberian airport for four days, waiting out a blizzard, bored out of his skull. “It is a dreadful sort of idleness, an unbearable tedium to sit motionless like this,” he wrote. “But on the other hand, don’t millions and millions of people the world over pass the time in just such a passive way. And haven’t they done so for years, for centuries?”

Kapuscinski recalled the countless scenes of waiting he’d witnessed during three decades of covering the Third World: “Everywhere, everywhere the same sight--people sitting motionless for hours on end, on old chairs, on bits of plank, on plastic crates, in the shade of poplars and mango trees, leaning against the walls of slums, against fences and window frames, irrespective of the time of day or of the season, of whether the sun is shining or the rain is falling, phlegmatic and expressionless people, as if in a state of chronic drowsiness, not really doing anything.”

You recall a statistic reprinted everywhere a few years back, attributed to a Pittsburgh research firm called Priority Management: Americans spend five years of their lives waiting in lines.

For a 75-year-long life, it comes out to more than 1 1/2 hours a day.

Can that possibly be true?

There are other statistics: On an average day, according to a book called “On an Average Day” by Tom Heymann, Americans spend 101,369,863 hours waiting in line. That’s 37 billion hours a year.

And that’s just waiting in line. But waiting is a many-splendored thing: Waiting for the weekend. Waiting for the Messiah. Waiting for the waiter. Waiting for your ship to come in. Waiting for takeoff. Waiting with bated breath. Waiting for a phone call.

There’s the intense waiting of childhood: Waiting for Christmas morning. Waiting for the last day of school. Waiting through endless car trips: Are we there yet?

Waiting to grow whiskers. Waiting to grow breasts. Waiting to grow up.

There’s the bittersweet waiting of romance and procreation: Waiting for her to notice you. Waiting for him to ask you out. Waiting for her to get ready. Waiting for him to pop the question. Waiting for your period. Waiting for the results of your pregnancy test. Waiting through your ninth month of pregnancy, which seems as long as the previous eight combined.

Some waiting is more painful: Waiting for the jury to reach a verdict. Waiting for biopsy results. Waiting in refugee camps. Waiting in prison. Waiting for your teenager, and it’s 2 in the morning and she hasn’t called. . . .

The poor wait more than the rich.

They wait in soup lines and welfare lines and unemployment lines. They wait in emergency rooms and free medical clinics. They cannot pay with money, so they pay with time--little chunks of their lives.

The poor wait for buses and subways while the rich zoom past in cars or glide by in limousines driven by chauffeurs who are waiting and ready to open the door when their bosses appear.

Once, Louis XIV stepped out of his palace to find his royal driver just arriving in the royal coach. The king was unhappy. “I almost had to wait,” he grumbled.

“If you have enough money, you can buy someone else’s time,” says psychologist Robert Levine. “You can pay people to run your errands. Your time is worth more than their time.”

In his book “A Geography of Time,” Levine codified what he calls the Rules of the Waiting Game. One rule was “Status dictates who waits”: The higher your rank, the more people you can keep waiting--and the longer you can keep them waiting.

When the company president wants to see you, you hustle to his office. Then he keeps you waiting, watching his secretary make phone calls for him. He’s too important to wait for someone to answer. So she gets them on the phone and says, “Please hold for Mr. Smith.”

It’s nothing personal, just a reminder of who’s boss. And it’s nothing new. In the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory VII is said to have forced Henry IV, the Holy Roman emperor who had challenged his authority, to stand barefoot in the snow for three days before meeting with him. In 1949, Joseph Stalin kept Mao Zedong waiting for 17 days in a dacha in the freezing Russian winter. Mao had just taken over China, but Stalin was showing him who was boss in the Communist world.

But you don’t have to be a pope or a dictator to play the game. Clerks enjoy this too, when they make you wait in line and then suddenly hang up a sign that says “Closed” and amble off.

“Making a person wait is an exercise in power,” Levine says. “There is no greater symbol of domination, since time is the only possession which can in no sense be replaced.”

Now the on-hold music is back again. It’s so nondescript you can’t tell if it’s the same song or a new one. Why don’t they play some rock ‘n’ roll?

Because it didn’t test well with focus groups.

James Kellaris, associate professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, was hired by a company he cannot name to determine what kind of music makes time pass quickly for people stuck on hold.

“They can’t really control the waiting time, so they use all kinds of strategies to distract people,” Kellaris says. “They hoped I could engineer some music that would shrink perceived time in relation to clock time.”

*

Perceived time is how long people think they spent on hold. Clock time is how long they actually spent on hold. Perceived time is inevitably longer than clock time, Kellaris says.

His focus groups in Indianapolis and Los Angeles listened to various kinds of music, then guessed how long they’d been listening.

Rock ‘n’ roll was the worst. “The music was so familiar that hearing a segment of a song inferred the entire song and maybe the entire repertoire of the artist,” he says, “so it had the effect of expanding perceived time.”

Kellaris found that men and women had different responses. For men, classical music reduced the perceived time on hold. For women, light jazz reduced it. Which didn’t help much. “They could have set up a tape that said, ‘If you’re female, press 1. If you’re male, press 2,’ ” he says, “but that seemed too controversial.”

The biggest controversy is whether one long serpentine line or many short lines is better. This is serious for businesses: Should you line people up in one long line, like they do at most banks? Or in many short lines, like they do in supermarkets? Single lines look longer, which can scare customers away. But multiple lines can frustrate customers who watch as people who arrived after them get served before them.

“When somebody slips by you, your psychological cost is high,” says MIT professor Richard C. Larson, who has created computer systems to help airlines, banks and department stores deal with their line problems. “You’re going to remember that. And maybe next time you’ll go to a place with a long serpentine line.”

But Ziv Carmon, a professor of consumer psychology at Duke University, says some businesses--fast-food restaurants with nearby competitors, for instance--should use multiple lines because they look shorter.

Vickie Lemons had more than 10 items that night in April 1998 in a Milwaukee supermarket. But nobody was in the express line, so the cashier invited Lemons in. Another woman pulled in behind Lemons with fewer than 10 items and started complaining. Out in the parking lot, the complaints escalated and police said the woman whipped out a pocket knife and sliced Lemons’ nose.

*

“As our pace of life gets more hectic, our tolerance for waiting in line goes down,” Larson says.

Obviously, we’ve got a problem. We keep creating products to eliminate delay but we’re still bedeviled by waiting.

We got tired of waiting in restaurants, so we invented fast-food joints. We got too impatient to wait for conventional ovens to cook our meals, so we invented microwave ovens to cook them faster. We got tired of waiting for the mail carrier, so we invented FedEx and faxes and e-mail.

Now we grumble about the lines in fast-food restaurants. We stand in front of our microwave wondering why it’s so slow. We grouse about how long it takes the computer to boot up. Every timesaving device allows us to put more on our schedule, which makes us more obsessed with time and less tolerant of waiting.

“Hello. . . . Can I help you? . . . Hello.”

You’re startled. Somebody has answered your call. An actual human is talking to you.

You stammer out your problem: “When is the repairman coming?”

“Oh, you want the customer service department,” she says. “This is the customer relations department. I’ll transfer you.”

“No,” you say. Stop. Wait!

But it’s too late. The phone is ringing.

“Thank you for calling the customer service department. All our lines are busy now, but your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. Please hold for the next available associate.”