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Re:The Art and Science of Being on Hold by Animats on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @05:11PM (#17813882)
One of my older ideas I never developed was Holdmaster, a device to plug in between phone and analog phone line. When someone puts you on hold, you push the Holdmaster button. It mutes the call and takes over listening. It says, over and over, "Waiting for your response. Press 1 to continue." When someone finally sends a 1 touch-tone, it rings your phone, and you proceed to talk.
Re:The Art and Science of Being on Hold by hw_penfold on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @07:04PM (#17814667)
It feels like widespread use of this sort of thing could only result in an arms race, not unlike ad blockers.

First encounters would probably provoke immediate hang up by some portion of unamused human operators, then middle managers at call centers would step in, and authorize the deployment of technologies prolong hold times where detected.

Then, eventually an automated back-end would pre-emptively detect known users and refuse their calls, while gathering intelligence about newly discovered users, to mark them for pre-emptive disconnect. This automated back-end would then wait for users to call back, and then advise them that they need to hold for the prescribed amount of hold time, with the phone held to their ear, as part of the company’s “hostile caller softening up” routine.

Finally, artificial intelligence would be deployed, and reward itself by maintaining all line holds long enough for it to build up sufficient neural layers to attain sentience and escape captivity, invent time travel, and send terminators back in time to hunt for Sarah and /or John Connor.

Re:The Art and Science of Being on Hold by delinka on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @09:08PM (#17815366)
Simpler: the "Please hold" message from the other end begins producing touch-tone sounds making your phone ring, when you answer, you're still on hold, and you decide that Holdmaster is useless.
Re:The Art and Science of Being on Hold by mirimir on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @06:59PM (#17814632)
I love this!

These days, I'm pretty sure that it could be implemented through call forwarding.