[bradlys]

That seems like an unusually small amount of times for 10 years. I could understand in a year but 10 is - wow - you must've gone out of your way to avoid being on hold.

I've been on hold a lot more often than a handful in the last decade and I don't make many phone calls. IRS, companies that messed up an order, cancelling services, government agencies, various small businesses that I call locally, and so much more that I am sure I am forgetting. Sometimes it's only 30 seconds of being on hold. Sometimes it's literally hours and - sadly - the connection gets cut off and I lose my place in line and I wasted a bunch of time having to listen to that noise in the background and unable to do much of anything else because of it.

The worst offenders are those that crank the music volume so high that it clips practically all the time - but then there are long times of silence or low audio - and then the music comes back clipping again... AND then when you finally connect, the person is so quiet that you can't hear them at all and they say, "hello? hello? bye" and they hang up.

I hope Apple gets this feature soon as I've been dying for this when I have to call some of those pesky places!

[dvtrn]

you must've gone out of your way to avoid being on hold.

I'm not OP but buddy you have no IDEA the depths I will go through to avoid having to pick up the phone and call "support" and deal with their endless IVRs or horribly implemented voice response systems or the endless transfers or the constant re-entry of my "customer verification info" because the last segment of the call didn't relay it to the next segment, or "yes I restarted my modem before I even called you look is there someone else I can talk to perhaps anyone in cargo shorts with a penguin poster in their zoom background? Does the word 'shibboleet' get me anywhere?"

Calling support and actually enduring the experience these days feels like it should be its own Olympic sport.

(However I absolutely love USAA's support system. Start on the app, if the app's "AI" attendant can't help you, a button comes up, press it, it immediately calls support and the person who answer already knows why you're calling based on your interaction with the app. MORE OF THIS PLEASE)

[bradlys]

I'm there with you - just saying that even with all the avoidance... you can't really avoid it unless you give someone else the task or have some special resources at your disposal to get direct lines to people.

[quercusa]

That's impressive. Nothing bugs me more than having to punch in my account number (or play the voice recognition game) and then have to go through it all again with the agent.