There’s many things we don’t like but will nevertheless have to do in life,
my father always used to tell me.
Little did I know at this time that holding your phone nearby for minutes, sometimes hours, would be one of them. You might be forced to book a doctor’s appointment. Maybe the product manual you read didn’t get any clearer after the fifth attempt of trying to decipher it. Insert any example linked to bureaucracy. Whatever event sent you to the hells of being held in a phone queue, the burn marks are equally as painful each time. Being put on hold comes with a mixture of uncomfortable anticipation that slowly evolves into mild, internalised aggression. This can only be counteracted with strong resilience and a shitton of hope that it might be your turn in any second. And if you only wait for long enough, you might experience a transformation of space and time around you - like an involuntary high that guarantees a bad trip and the inevitable, painful comedown.
There’s a point at which the concept of time becomes fluid: Has it been three minutes or did I time-travel to a different century? Is this the universe in which it’s never my turn and people will find my dead body years later with my phone glued to my hand? It makes you wonder how you’re doing in an alternate universe, some different timeline. However, no matter the right answer, you’re forced to deal with the events happening in your current life. Some poor choice of music receives your undivided attention again, and you hope that it might just stop and relieve you of your suffering. You’ve already come so far, there’s no going back now.
The sound coming out of your speakerphone relaxes you as much as elevator music turns a 30 sec journey into a short rave. It just doesn’t. It’s impossible for it to fulfill any other purpose than to give people the desire to escape as quickly as possible. You’re jittery. Impatient. Enraged, almost. As more mundane minutes pass by, suddenly the idea of immortality doesn’t seem as attractive anymore. At least life would feel a lot longer if only there was a constant, running stream of phone queue music running in the background of every scene of our lives.
Did you just come up with the closest solution to getting a bigger chunk of immortality without the need of any magical super-pill or sensible lifestyle choices? Maybe. It’s just that there’s really no time to think about anything while impatiently waiting for it to be your turn. But there’s also so much time to do everything. Here’s 10 things you can do to pass some time that definitely travels much slower when passing through the beginning and end of a phone queue:
Paint your bedroom walls
Advance your patience skills needed for surviving a phone queue by watching the paint dry
Learn a new skill, like knitting or how to walk on a plank 100 metres up in the air
Plant a garden
Solve world hunger
Get a haircut
Regret the haircut, grow your hair out, and reinvent yourself with a better one
Call your mum and remind yourself why you never call her first
Travel to Cuba and build a school for special needs students
Learn how to levitate off the floor with the power of your mind and maybe a little black magic
Go through that list maybe once or twice, and it might be your turn soon! Unless you’ve fallen asleep in the time it’s taken the other end to respond to your call, in which case: Feel free to dial again.
