Waiting for Xfinity

Somewhere in the United States, at any given moment, an estimated several hundred thousand people are on hold with Comcast. The math is rough but the silence is specific: roughly 32 million residential customers, an estimated 32 to 64 million service calls a year, average hold times that lean toward the long end of the 5-to-15-minute cable-industry range. Comcast's customer satisfaction scores — consistently around 56 out of 100 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index, when the industry average runs closer to 65 — suggest these are not short, pleasant waits. The music they hear during them has never once been documented.

That absence is the story. Search every consumer forum, every Reddit thread, every corporate filing. Comb through Xfinity's community boards, press releases, and FCC disclosures. You will find nothing. No one has written down what Comcast plays while you wait. It exists in a kind of cultural blind spot: too ubiquitous to notice, too generic to name.

The best inference — and it is only an inference — points to a 37-year-old recording made by two teenagers on a four-track machine in a California garage. Tim Carleton and his high school friend Darrick Deel recorded what they called "Opus Number One" in 1989 on a Yamaha DX7IIFD synthesizer, running the output through an Alesis Midiverb reverb unit specifically to hide the instrument's polyphony limitations. Deel later joined Cisco and helped develop the company's first VoIP phone system. When engineers needed a default track for the music-on-hold slot in Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Deel thought of the old recording and cleared it with Carleton. It became the default hold music for millions of Cisco phone deployments worldwide. If Comcast's call centers run on Cisco infrastructure — which the public record neither confirms nor denies — then "Opus Number One" is what you hear.

The track has since developed a strange half-life. Sara Corbett produced a piece for This American Life about her 81-year-old father-in-law Dick, who had become, in her words, "obsessed with a limbo most of us hate" — specifically with identifying the hold music he kept hearing on the phone. His quest eventually led to Carleton and Deel. The piece aired in 2014, for a few weeks the internet briefly cared, and then the music went back to being invisible.

This is episode two of a series that treats hold music as an artifact worth preserving. Not because it is good — it is, in Philip Glass's ranking, roughly at the bottom of the hierarchy he reserved for Muzak, the genre that hold music descends from. But because a sound heard by this many people, for this many hours, while they wait for someone to fix their cable or dispute a charge, is a kind of folk record of institutional life. The Muzak Corporation was founded on exactly this philosophy, if not quite this framing: George Owen Squier patented the transmission of music over power lines in the 1920s, the company rebranded in 1934 (the name is "music" welded to "Kodak," a deliberate act of brand mimicry), and by the 1990s an estimated 80 million people heard it daily without ever choosing to. Muzak filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and sold to Mood Media in 2011 for $345 million. The hold music it inspired outlived it.

"Waiting for Xfinity" extends the Cisco/Comcast archetype into a full composition: electric piano on the melodic line, soft synthesizer bass, a muted counter-melody that could be a trumpet or a guitar processed until it's neither, brushed percussion light enough to not quite register as percussion. The spoken intro at the top lays out the numbers. The music after it does what hold music has always done — it fills time without demanding attention, it suggests motion while nothing moves, it is optimistic in a way that is slightly embarrassing once you notice it. Comcast's FY2024 10-K confirms that its customer service teams operate around the clock for 32 million households. It does not mention the music.