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"Oh, be damned perennial pause!" undoubtedly thinkst thou, "Why, oh, why have I been waiting these past 25 minutes listening to Greensleeves on continuous loop when all I'm after is one tinsy, weensy, simple yes or no answer from your esteemed company's telephone assistance officers! why?! why! WHY!!"

Why torture thyself thus, wretched wretch? an intelligent, astute creature such as ye surely knows that A) intelligent, astute people don't call such ironically-named help-lines because they know that B) the esteemed companies -- and more particularly, government departments -- don't give a flying duck about your tinsy, weensy, simple little problems, and also that C) the lines are clogged with various ignorami who know neither A nor B.

Besides, there's probably only one consultant at the end of that line anyhow, a weedy, malnourished, incompetent, inadequately trained first year uni student with poor social skills but a huge overbite and tinea (if that doesn't make the worst phone reps, I don't know what does)

Or worse: some smooth-skinned, smooth-talking, over-cheery, over-trained, over-confident moped-riding 21-year-old too big for his designer label boots who explains to you patiently, patronisingly, and absolutely irrefutably that the broken, lost or misunderstood thing you're querying has been broken, lost or misunderstood by you and thus the company doesn't give a flying duck about it or you. But have a nice day.

No, being put on hold indefinitely is definitely the least of your worries.

“But I have better things to be doing!” you cry “I don’t want to be on my deathbed one of the 80% of all people who’ve realized they’d spend a cumulative total of 53 days of their life on hold!”

First of all, you just made that statistic up. And second, what more important things could you be doing? Winging to your therapist about how nobody wants to listen to you winging anymore unless you pay them by the hour? Shopping for a new home espresso machine? Watching Big Brother? Driving to the sauna in your air-conditioned car? Reading the back pages of the paper? My impatient friend, this too shall pass.

What is it with this society and its obsession with time anyhow? It’s not like anything we do is any more meaningful anyway, or satisfying, but we feel if we just keep doing it more and more, and quicker and quicker, somehow it will all whip itself up into some sort of enlightenment. Unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, fulfillment doesn’t come in 2-minute ready-to serve packets. And it isn’t 97% fat free, unencumbered by experience, trial-and-error, hard work, and, our pet-peeve, prolonged periods of time.

It’s like, while we’re moving faster and faster, we don’t seem to be approaching anything even remotely resembeling goal posts, or even a finishing line. Perhaps that is why we seem so obsessed with filling every moment with activity, arbitrary as it may be, so we feel we are actually achieving something after all. So we can die happy knowing we never wasted a moment, never wasted any precious time on frivolous activity such as day-dreaming, contemplating, being at peace with ourselves, thinking absolutely nothing. We can rest assured that we did everything in our power to never have a free minute, never to squander time, because time is money, you know, and the more we have of it…oh, wait…

Maybe somebody ought to have spent more time pondering that and not rushing to meet their publisher’s deadline. Time is not money. Time is egalitarian – we all have equal amounts of it. So why this fixation with having less than ever before, oh woe is us, and ever so many more things to do? If time was money perhaps we’d take a little more care in spending it, perhaps we’d be a little bit stingier, using it only for the things we really, really need or really, really want.

So my point is that minutes or hours supposedly wasted on hold aren’t that big a waste as anything else you could be doing is probably ultimately just as meaningless.

Instead you should rejoice at these precious few moments of peace and solitude. Enjoy doing nothing for a while. Meditate. Pray. Think of a witty opening to that novel you’ve always wanted to write. Breathe. Smile. Because your call has progressed in the queue and will be attended to by the next available customer-consultant.