What To Do When Waiting In A Queue On The Phone

From before the times of telephones
queues have always been 'popular'
with the authorities who believed
that the  public should be made
to wait to make them more grateful
when they were eventually served.

If the public did not say 'Thank you'
then the powers that be extracted
all the gratitude they wanted,
through how slowly they bled
all sense of urgency out of the public
with how they were made to wait
as if the public were at the back and call
of the all-powerful officials.

But now we have a new phenomenon;
the queue to be personally answered on the telephone.

My recipe for refreshing yourself
whilst listening to the interval music
and being told about the website ad nauseam
is at the start have with you a pen and paper
and for each cycle of music and a repeated message
on a piece of paper put a 1 until you four in a row.
On the fifth message/piece of music put a / across the four I's.

Now you have a barn gate, which stands in for the figure 5.
Repeat until the people at the other end answer the phone
and attend to your needs, are at least attempt to be courteous.

Note how long they take to respond personally to your call.

Divide the length of your wait to the nearest minute
by the number of barn gates you have created
and that will tell the length of their message and music,
and you will have kept yourself attentive to the the end.