Is ‘on-hold’ music engineered to annoy?

Screen Shot 2013-01-25 at 10.00.08 AMI’ve heard that fast food restaurants pick colors and designs that make people uncomfortable enough to not want to stay there for very long. As I sit here on hold waiting for tech support I wonder if the really cheesy ‘almost jazz’ music and overly perky female voice recordings of ‘We know your time is valuable, please hold until the next available agent is available and they will be happy to assist you’ have picked is specifically to annoy callers to give up on the call.

I also wonder if they don’t really even start trying to answer the calls until 5 – 10 minutes have gone by, just to make sure people REALLY want to talk to someone. Are you really swamped at 9 AM EST? I doubt that.

Are there evil psychologists that help businesses do these things? It’s so annoying I have to believe no one picked this music by choice, they probably paid big money for recordings that would decrease the load on their help desks.

May karma strike them down.

My latest thoughts on the ‘new’ Antioch College

I wrote the following on the ACAN mailing list last night regarding the current state of Antioch College. For anyone reading this who isn’t neck deep in this struggle this probably isn’t worth your time reading since it likely won’t make sense out of context. I’m including portions of the e-mail I was responding to in here. If you feel so moved you can read the whole thread this part of athttp://saveantioch.org/pipermail/acan_saveantioch.org/2010-October/thread.html . So that’s the disclaimer, this is long, boring, and not terribly relevant to most anyone reading this here but I wanted to save it here as a point in time snapshot on my feelings about Antioch.

Continue reading My latest thoughts on the ‘new’ Antioch College