When the Hold Button Stuck

We started the morning like any other, coffee stale, headsets humming the same marimba loop.

At 09:13 the switchboard flashed a warning: “Unusually high call volume”. We checked the logs – no spikes, just the usual mid‑morning lull.

Someone – probably Shaz – hit the hold button on the training line and forgot to release it. The system kept recycling the greeting: “All of our agents are currently busy”.

We watched the counter tick: position in the queue stayed at one, even though nobody else was on the line.

The phrase looped so long it started to feel like a policy memo rather than a hold message.

We began to chant it back, half‑joking, half‑testing the acoustics of the break‑room tiles.

By lunch the IVR had etched the line into our muscle memory: “Your position in the queue is one”.

We decided to capture the moment, not as a bug report but as a found‑poetry exercise.

We copied the audio onto the old headset mic, chopped the repetition, and let it sit under the modem handshake riser we keep for emergencies.

The result was a four‑on‑the‑floor chant that sounded less like a queue and more like a corporate mantra.

We still haven’t figured out why the system thought we were busy, but the hold music hasn’t stopped since.

Now we leave the line open, just in case anyone else needs to hear it.