Please change your hold music
A desperate plea from a weary doctor
The following letter, reprinted with kind permission of Dr. Steven Schlozman, can also be found in one of my books, Letters of Note: Music. Because most of you deserve it, I’ve also embedded audio of the letter being read by Stephen Mangan. That audio comes from the accompanying audiobook. The photo (featuring a man who is not, to my knowledge, Dr. Steven Schlozman) was found at Getty. Finally, keep scrolling to hear the offending hold music.
As Chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Vermont and Medical Director at the Vermont Center for Children, Youth, and Families, Dr. Steven Schlozman spends an inordinate amount of time on the phone to CVS, a pharmaceutical behemoth whose retail stores have reached all corners of the United States since the company was founded in 1963. Frustratingly for Dr Schlozman, for the past twenty years CVS have neglected to refresh the hold music which greets those who call for healthcare assistance, instead offering up the same piece of piano music each and every time a customer calls. In May 2018, at his wit’s end, Dr Schlozman wrote to them with a plea which, thanks to the power of the Internet, was soon read by millions.
Ten months and much coverage later, CVS announced that plans were underway to install a new telephone system.
Dear CVS,
Please change your hold music.
Please. Do the right thing.
It’ll take you, or someone who works for you, or even a barely pubescent adolescent who nevertheless knows how to program music on his iPhone with more aplomb than anyone born before 1975, only about 48 seconds.
And 48 seconds is substantially less than the amount of time I have listened to your never-changing hold music.
I have researched the source of this music online. I did this, as you might guess, when I was on hold. It seemed the healthiest response I could muster to that faux-soothing piano wandering that is supposed to placate customers for anywhere between 20 seconds and 35 minutes.
I am just guessing at these wait times, by the way. That data might be out there and it might not, but I can’t bring myself to see how long my waiting compares to the average waiting.
And, to be clear, I am not critical of being on hold. I know the pharmacists are working as hard as they can. I know it’s part of our modern world. This is why we have social media, and ESPN.com, and trashcans placed about four or five feet away, into which I can toss crumpled-up pieces of paper. In fact, being on hold has greatly improved my trashcan basketball accuracy, so there’s that. Thank you.
Still, that tune has got to go.
I hear it in my sleep. I hear it when I go running. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night humming that melody. It haunts me, day and night. It’s not healthy. I know. I’m a doctor.
It’s not healthy to hear pharmacy-hold music while you sleep.
Oh, you want data?
Fair enough.
CVS hold music stimulates the almond-shaped amygdala that sits in our reptilian brains, and that’s not good. This is the same region of the brain involved in road rage, and in raising your middle finger, and in listening to the Steve Miller Band sing "Abracadabra."
Some 98 percent of respondents in a large, multi-center study examining the average American’s response to the CVS pharmacy hold music reported that their amygdalae (the plural of amygdala) were enraged.
This study, obviously, does not exist. But it could!
The subjects would be made up entirely of me, or lots of me’s. You see, there are many, many different me’s that have listened to that same tune while on hold at CVS. There’s the me who is in-between patients and operating under the resilient but nevertheless largely naive belief that I can solve a prior authorization quandary in somewhere around four minutes. There’s the me, nervous about my daughter’s ear infection, and hoping that the antibiotics are ready. There’s the me doing laps in my car around and around the street where I live, waiting for the music to end so that I can talk to an organic entity and call in a prescription.
As for numbers, I’ve got those figured out as well.
Let’s say I call CVS, on average, three times per day, six days a week, for a period of about the last 25 years. That would allow me to count my residency as well as post-graduate years. Let’s subtract a couple weeks a year for holidays and so forth.
That means that three times per day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year for 25 years, I’ve called CVS. And let’s estimate that the average time that I am treated to this music is around 1 minute, 34 seconds.
That means that I have made approximately 22,500 calls to CVS, and I am, in all honesty grateful for their service. (6 x 3 x 50 x 25 = 22,500)
Of course, I am making an assumption that the hold music has not changed over the last 25 years. This is because I don’t recall it changing. It’s like taxes. I don’t remember a time when it didn’t exist. Accepting this assumption as fact—because it feels like fact—this means that I have listened to roughly 2,115,000 seconds of that same music. That’s 35,250 minutes, or 587-1/2 hours, or nearly 25 days.
Almost 25 days of my life listening. I am 52 years old, so that means that I have spent 25 days out of my 18,980 days on this planet listening to that piano piece (called, incidentally, “Golden Dragon”—I Googled it while I was on hold). That’s a higher percentage of my days than I’d like.
So let me be clear. I don’t object to being on hold. I hate it, but I am at peace with it. I object to being on hold for more than 587 hours of my hard-earned life while listening to that same tune.
As I hope this piece illustrates, this is a matter of some urgency.
Please change the music.
Please.
With warmest regards,
Steve
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He's a very patient man. To the extreme. I can barely stand it for a first time listener. With that in mind, I have to say that the never-ending hold messages of business promotion that exist today are enough for me to actually decide not to get a plumber even when I need one.
YES! Thank you, Dr. Steve.