Thanks for holding

In October, I’ll be taking a trip to Milwaukee for a conference. Don’t pretend you’re not jealous. Maybe if you’re nice, I’ll bring you back some Laverne and Shirley shirts.

Anyway, I’m technically taking a trip to get there from College Station to Dallas to Atlanta to Milwaukee and then another home from Milwaukee to Cincinnati to Dallas to College Station. Why? Partly because that was the cheapest option (I’ll never understand why it’s cheaper to take extra flights) and partly because our wee podunk little airport only has a couple of flights coming in and out per day, severely limiting one’s options.

Anyhoo, the point of all this is that I’ve set up plane reservations four months in advance for a six-stage roundtrip journey. Of course, this means that one of the airlines had to go ahead and change their flight schedule, thereby completely screwing up the delicate chain of dominoes I had set in place as my itinerary.

So, last Saturday morning, I got an e-mail from Travelocity saying something to the effect of, “Hey jerky, your schedule is all messed up. Give us a call.” So I did.

I expected to be put on hold. I don’t really have a problem with that – it would be pretty unrealistic for me to expect them to have enough phone jockeys sitting around just in case 200,000 people all called in at the same time. And with it being a Saturday, I was prepared for a pretty long wait.

I did end up waiting a long time – 14 minutes before a real person picked up the line. After about 15 seconds of talking to me, she put me on hold for another 12 minutes. Ultimately, my outbound flight schedule did get fixed and I’m happy about that. In fact, I should now actually get there a half-hour earlier.

The problem is what went on during those 26 minutes of waiting. To put it nicely, Travelocity has the loudest, crappiest, most ear-splitting on-hold music I’ve ever heard. It sounds like they’ve been using the same tape since 1987 and they’ve got that sucker cranked up all the way. With all the business they do, don’t you think they could afford something a little softer? Or perhaps they could just turn the volume down a little bit so it’s not blaring at people who are probably already a little angry?

I (understandably) got a little bored during all of the waiting, so I made a short video so that I could share the awesomeness of the Travelocity on-hold music with all of you. Keep in mind, the audio distortion you’re hearing is not being caused by the video camera’s microphone, nor is it being caused by my iPhone’s speaker. This is how Travelocity is punishing all of the people who dare to call their customer service line:

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• Things must be getting lonely up north. Our upstairs lumberjack neighbors aren’t just using Facebook to recruit folks to move to their country; they also want people to actually become Canadian citizens.
• A while back, I told you we had a chicken pot pie bandit on the loose in our community. Now it appears that Satan has been caught stealing software from Wal-Mart. This can’t be good for our property values.
• Another sign that my birthplace gets no respect – the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department operates 30 regional and field law enforcement offices across the state and the only one that doesn’t handle boat registrations is… you guessed it — Freeport! Sure, because people who live right next to the freaking Gulf of Mexico don’t have any boats which might need to be registered.
• Way to be ready for the new iPhone launch, AT&T. Might be time for Apple to look for a new dance partner here in the states.