Hang on in there – pausing on the long but hopeful trek towards the service help-desk and perhaps the resolution of another of life's little difficulties, the customer is annoyed by the shortcomings of systems design but enriched by the moments of prayer and contemplation and the injunction to ‘hold during the silence’.

‘Please hold during the silence’

This plea may never reach the life-coaching top ten.  As an embroidered slogan it may never attract critical acclaim at the Tate Modern T-Shirt retrospective ‘Stretching the Imagination’.  It may not instantly appeal as a suitable topic for intense training workshops, or a National Vocational Qualification, but it is a sure sign of a truly competent consumer that he or she has mastered the art of holding during the silence.

Among the many blessings that modern technology confers upon our society, the long button-pressing-trail-a-winding to that corner of the help-desk most unsuited to answering any of those things of which we may enquire, is not one of them.  But, surely, we can hold during the silence?

This virtue, this patient capacity, this dexterous dismissal of delays and difficulties, does not come to us naturally but must be urged upon us lest we forget that silence is golden and assume that the lack of noise, clicks, music, side-tone, negative or positive feedback, means that the thread has snapped, the connection is lost, there is no going forward, but only the prospect that, in the snakes and ladders of customer service, the long evil serpent on square 99 has sent us slithering back to the bottom of the class and all because we were unworthy, we were incapable, we knew nothing of holding during the silence.

It is a test of will-power, of trust in technology, of our willingness to accept short-comings, of our inner belief in the essential goodness of systems designers - even at 50p per minute but not expected to last more than 20 – and yet how often we fail to last the course.  How often we jump prematurely into the Abyss of the Disconnected – to join the ranks of the fallen, the slip-sliding incompetents, those of little faith who had neither the resolve nor the stamina to hold during the long silence.

In much the same way that poetry promoters have produced market survey data purporting to show that well-read lyrical lovers will hear Yes more often than No, maybe Zen-schooled customer services designers should promote their desperate plea as one of the essential clues to blissful interpersonal relationships – for surely who could resist a lifetime of devotion with someone who is well-able to hold during the silences?