Do Not Hang Up

Delta's reservation line: one eight hundred, two two one, one two one two. The music you are holding in was written by Harriet Goldberg, a social worker who took up jazz in her late forties and never played a live gig. In twenty seventeen, a licensing house placed it with Amazon's contact-centre service, which supplies hold music to tens of thousands of businesses. Delta has played it ever since; nobody at Delta chose it by name. The same recording also holds the line at Capital One, Costco and JetBlue. On an ordinary weekday, a few hundred people are inside it on Delta's phones alone, waiting.