Why is being “on hold” on the telephone not made less annoying?

My "favorite" annoying hold queue was a couple years back when I regularly had to call the business support line of a big computer manufacturer. It'd go something like this:

<1 minute of epic flute solo> <sound of phone being picked up> Thank you for holding. One of our employees will be with you shortly <repeat from the start>

You'd basically get startled into thinking someone had picked up once a minute. The flute solo got especially grating after the first half hour of waiting.

On the other hand the ISP I'm currently using has probably the best hold queue I've ever used. You'll call in, be asked for your postal code at which point the system tells you if there are any known service disruptions in your area. Then there's about ~30s of ringing tone after which an actual human picks up the phone. It's the only big company I know of that has you connected with a human in <5 minutes.

I have an Asterisk exchange at home (1 message asking people to choose a digit for the person they want to speak to cuts 99% of telemarketers)

The thing that annoys me the most about being on hold is that it requires attention from me that eats into me doing other stuff while I wait .... in fact if the people who you're calling are too bust to talk to you right now it's they who should be on hold.

So the thing I keep meaning to implement for my exchange is a feature that puts a line into a "waiting for hold" state - you do this and put the phone down - Asterisk keeps saying to the still open line "I still want to talk to you, please press '' when a real person is on the line" ... when they take you off of hold they press '', your phone rings you answer and talk to them

The best support queue experience I've ever had was with Sonic.net. The first thing they do is ask if you want someone to call you instead of waiting on the line. You still have to wait the same amount of time, but you don't have to be on the phone. You can also go to their website and put in your phone number and they'll call you.

GoDaddy has an option to “mute the music” when you call in thank goodness. Nothing worse than being on hold for 10 minutes and can’t do anything because the music destroys any concentration potential you might have.