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Comment by rfrey | Hacker News Reader

I was once on the phone with a cell phone company customer support rep who was clearly as dis-empowered as it's possible for a worker to be. He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me, so I used my normal tactic of just refusing to give up - I was friendly enough but refused to end the call. He was refusing to escalate my call, but couldn't help me himself.

20 or 25 minutes in I realized that wasn't going to work, so I asked if they had a protocol to escalate in an abusive situation. He said "ummm....". I said, "hey, you're doing a great job, and I hope the rest of your day goes better, and I hope you know you're not a motherfucker, you motherfucker."

I think (hope?) he stifled a laugh and said "I'm afraid I'll have to escalate this call to my manager, sir."

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> He was obviously forbidden to hang up on me

Plenty of big companies found a workaround. The "forever on hold" routine where they don't hang up, you will eventually. This works perfectly for toll free numbers (so you can't claim you had to pay for the call) and provides just the right amount of plausible deniability (took longer than expected to find an answer, it was an accident, etc.).

I have my suspicions that in some cases this also prevents the survey going out to the customer. All the more reason to abuse it.

Call in on a second line and ask when you will be taken off hold.

Back before the days that you could do almost everything over internet but cell phones still existed I had to go to a business to do some transactions on a pretty regular basis. Unfortunately they also were required to answer calls during all that and it was very interruptive. Eventually I realized they had only two lines so I'd call in and ask to be put on hold, then ask the guy behind the counter for his cell and call in and ask to be put on hold again.

Is it even possible to keep someone "on hold" forever? My experience (in Poland) was that it'll take at most 20-30 minutes before something somewhere timeouts and the call gets disconnected.

I've been on hold for 4+ hours when dealing with the California government. The only timeout there is at the end of the business day, when it will automatically hang up.

Try calling the assurance maladie in France :) I gave up after about 80 minutes of their little silly jingle while the agent was allegedly looking for the answer to my problem.

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