Hold music
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Conference Call Anatomy™
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A badge of honour amongst people of a certain disposition (“warteschleifenmusikopfer”) — they who think the early bird gets the worm, the first cut is the deepest and so on.
There is something psychotic about an organisation which expects you to listen without protest to its own corporate tune on a 15 second loop while the AV guy in the room spends 15 minutes trying to find the chairperson's passcode to open an all hands conference call that, in itself, promises an hour and half of excruciation. In the very chord progression of that high-energy percussive turnaround — transmitted through one ear of a telephone receiver for maximum total harmonic distortion — you can almost see the remaining good years of your life leaking out of you, in fifteen-second drips, as you sit there. You can’t even get on with any other work in the mean time.
One can also draw xenophobic stereotypes over nations and their hold music. The Brits will prefer Elgar (though Europhiles might stretch to Vivaldi); the Luxembourgische a fluffy Straussian waltz; the Austrians a Scorpions greatest hits compilation, while German firms do have hold music (“warteschleifenmusik”) - usually Brahms or something like that — but prefer a stern female voice intoning “BITTE WARTEN. BITTE WARTEN.”