Thank You For Holding. Your Call Is Important To Us. Please Wait While…

Who benefits from the extra work of waiting for service — and data input — we now must do?

Ever hear this on your phone?

“Thank you for holding. Our scheduler will be with you shortly. Your call is important to us…”

Have you thought about who is thanking you? Have you considered whether any other human life-from has seriously heard what they are saying to you? The answer, of course, is NO.

Consumer culture, which we now fully expect, is part of the problem. Often, if you are on the phone waiting, it’s to buy some service or product. Few of these purchases make us happy and almost none of them connect to human relationships that are lasting and meaningful to us.

This is not about the rise of our AI machine overlords, (another monster ready to eat us all) this is about how we willingly give away our lives to this apologetically grateful-for- your-business drone on the phone.

A machine recording is saying this. It is devised to somehow suggest to you that someone cares that you are trying to get some work done on five other tasks: getting the cat more water, signing those documents, editing an article, picking up those candy wrappers, and getting the ball point pen to stop skipping as you take notes.

Maybe you’re waiting in line, nothing better to do, right?

Wrong.

No living, breathing entity on this recording, is even slightly interested that you have a life going on all around you. Sky. Clouds.

Maybe there is even a tree over there. A Rowan tree.

If you don’t have time to notice the tree, I promise you, you will lose it.

This is how we lose the world. Multi-tasking. Inattention. Disconnecting from others and place.

It’s just the price of getting stuff done…

When you do finally speak to that clerk, scheduler, plumber assistant, retailer, prescription filler, vet tech, government agency representative (god forbid!) the actual, human conversation could take about 50 seconds.

I timed it. Meanwhile, your life is always, at least partially, on hold.

We have willingly volunteered to have hours of our lives taken from us.

Some of us can do so much on automatic that we forget that our lives may have been given to us as a gift for a higher purpose. Giving back, perhaps. Or breathing air. Or noticing that curious crow over there.

I can’t be the only one who finds waiting on hold (while I try to do other work) completely maddening. Tell me your stories. You must exist for more than the function of just recording redundant data.

There is all the data dumps you must do to make sure you’re information is correct. Fill out the form, but do it over and over for the rest of your life. After all, what is life even for?

Last four? Date of birth? Which zip?

On being cranky in the 21st century

Was there a time when people didn’t have to provide personal intel hundreds of times over? Was there a when or where in which maybe we didn’t have to use so many trees, watts, and hours to repeatedly sell the moments of existence we are given?

We don’t have to go back to the stone age to want a little bit of life back.

Studies have shown that people feel alienated, frustrated, even susceptible to stress, burnout, anxiety, and deaths of despair. This coincides with our globalization, but also with our disconnecting technology.

I’ve been sick, and I am kind of cranky. Anyone who navigates healthcare/insurance/purchasing probably is. There is also home maintenance, which is phone tag with many rounds.

Don’t mind me. I just wonder why we all do all of this. Does the consuming of our lives for the purpose of consuming the planet help someone?

It has been shown repeatedly that multi-tasking not only destroys focus, but it decreases ability to do any one job well. Our constant attention and distraction by all the other tasks and bleepin’ everything running at every moment of our existence is distracting at best, and destructive in our very real sensory deprivation to the reality of an external world that we are slowly consuming at an alarming rate. Or, I’m just grumpy.

The work we used to do socially on sidewalks and at a tangible (actual) public market is now done primarily in the suffocating cocoon of your own device bubble.

If we have time to interact with the way in which our species evolved — at least with other human beings while committing capitalism — we might recapture some lost arts.

At the very least, noticing the world, gives us a few extra moments of our own time to feel something akin to awareness of others, and other sensory realities that sustain life on Earth.

Let’s put that another way: breathe the Rowan tree.

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