What not to play for customers on hold

A few years ago I had to call the IRS to get a little error straightened out. Turned out the reason my tax refund had not arrived yet, a month after I had filed, was because they had mistakenly applied my entire refund for that year as a pre-payment for the next year's taxes.

I didn't have much trouble getting that resolved, though I did get put on hold at one point. While I was on hold I heard one of the worst possible bits of hold music: "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg, from Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt .



Not that this is a bad song. It's a good song. A great song. A stirring, frenetic, fist-pumping bit of music that was once anthologized on a disc called "Classical Thunder." It's just not the sort of thing to put people in a relaxed, patient, happy-to-be-on-hold state of mind. Especially when they're on hold with the IRS.