Must listen: We've found the real Bastard Operator From Hell Nobody likes having to deal with cold calls to the office. But when you're manning the IT help desk, you have no choice but to pick up the phone – even when it's a pushy sales pitch. So what to do about those annoying calls from over-enthusiastic sales staff itching to shift their technology wares? One spectacularly …
Most impressive. Everyone working together using a loose and evolving collection of engineering, – behavioral and organizational practices focused on going rapidly, safely, and sustainably from idea to customer / business value.” It's DevOps !
At long last we have a case study of what a successful DevOps project can do ......send people to Hell.
I managed about a minute but I had to turn the volume down. This is beautiful! I wish most projects had that kind of dedicated teamwork and inspiration. I guess it makes a big difference when you have a solid set of requirements that everyone believes in.
The only problem is it is too bad, and most sales people will hang up after listening to it for 30 seconds. You want to waste as much of their time as possible. :) May I suggest a some Justin Bieber songs interspersed with the usual "your call is very important to us" bullshit and perhaps an evil wait time counter that slowly decreases but never actual hits zero. You might be able to keep one of them on hold for as much as 15 minutes, and even better - they will have that Justin Bieber song stuck in their head all day.
Edit: Another evil post suggested you include lots of bad cell connection type crappyness. That is great! I am wondering if after a random value of 10-30 minutes, drop the the call. Be sure to proved the real number that connects to the extension so if they call back you won't be bothered.
Love it, but it'll only make the scumbag hang up quick.
I prefer the idea described on el Reg recently where the caller is conned into hanging on as long as possible. (I loved the bee on my arm bit!).
Modify the idea a bit to make it seem more appropriate to commercial environment ...
Pass the call to a hold facility, choose the music carefully to annoy but to also encourage...
Intersperse with random "helpful" announcements .... mention that all calls are recorded for "training and other" purposes <get all copyrights for call>....
Add some juicy long ads for the Company's products ... or other "products"
Include regular but random "countdown" advisories. You are now 9th in the queue .... 3rd ... 2nd ..."we're very sorry but your call has been jumped by a higher priority call ... please wait, your call is very important to us" ... 5th ... 4th .... "we hope you are enjoying our hold music ... please hold"... You are now number n (slight change & different voice to raise false hope) ...
If you would like to change the hold music please press the #key ....Please hold while we choose some new hold music ... 10 seconds of silence .... please hold ... <loud crackle> <louder crackle> barely audible 'orrible music rising slowly ... please hold, your call ... 'More
'orrible music now excessively loud and slightly distorted ... you are now n+4 in the queue ...
After several minutes " If your call is really urgent you may like to call our high priority extension number 666" ...
Please hold .... ....
We seem to be having an unusual number of incoming calls at the moment, please hold ... your call is very important we're having extra resources installed to cope with the unprecedented demand .... If your call is really urgent you might wish to leave your details on our voicemail system. To do do press * now.
<new music> Please hold ..... you are no 6 in a queue .... <3 mins later> we're sorry, due to unprecedented demand this facility is not available at the moment , press 3 to continue ... <original hold music>
Now add some long random telephone trees to navigate and some auto answering / questioning with voice recognition which never QUITE gets the right answer but offers to escalate the caller to another queue where they will be able to speak with a real person ... (at an overseas call centre) ...
Stuff the best ones somewhere on the company website as a deterrent ....
You might like me if you met me socially ........
I've never heard X-Idol-Voice-Talent-Thing or Justin Beiber. At least, not knowingly: I wouldn't have a clue if I did.
But that track was a lot more entertaining than a lot of the pop that's all-too-regularly inflicted on us by the likes of the BBC. Most recently 'Prince'. When a star is celebrated, why can none of the fawning sycophants ever play us any track that varies in the slightest from a formulaic pop 4/4 allegro tedioso with all the musicality of a pneumatic drill? This track is rather fun by comparison.
Most recently 'Prince'. When a star is celebrated, why can none of the fawning sycophants ever play us any track that varies in the slightest from a formulaic pop 4/4 allegro tedioso with all the musicality of a pneumatic drill?
The reason they play so much of "The artist formerly known as alive" is not for your enjoyment, it's to milk the death for all it's worth as it's one last run at everything where fans will even buy the crud the artist made before they found the rhythm that made their fanbase and income.
We've been having discussions here if someone is quietly assassinating the old guard to both boost sales as well as get rid of those who know how to negotiate a contract..
"...why can none of the fawning sycophants ever play us any track that varies in the slightest from a formulaic pop 4/4 allegro tedioso with all the musicality of a pneumatic drill?"
Yeah, heaven forbid they might do a Led Zepplin style thing with 7/8 time or anything.
This "hell" recording is nice, but to be super-cringe material it must compete against stuff like O Superman by Laurie Anderson.
I thought the article was funny, but playing the track had me in tears laughing. Well played guys.
I don't get many sales calls because I am registered with the corporate telephone preference service, and then religiously take calls from market research companies and tell them that we have no IT budget, no outstanding requirements, and everything is outsourced on multi year agreements, which then goes on the experian (etc.) data which means I am not on the lists that most people buy. But that still means that I get salesdroids working at places too tight to use experian and too unprofessional to screen against blacklists calling me anyway.
I'm now considering how I can program this up on my ancient telephone system. I'm thinking manually editing in a 20 minute long message to the file the voicemail greeting plays for an individual extension might be the way forwards. Hmm.
It clearly needs an edit to sound worse though, the sound quality is tood good at the moment. It also needs to fade in and out of sounding like your using VOIP over an unmanaged and overtaxed line to be more convincing. I'm also thinking I could play an interesting shell game with an infinately self referencing automated attendant. That and it should start down from like 3 minutes at quarter speed with longer gaps in the music (which shifts perspective of how long your on hold) and when you get to 15 seconds it should start counting back up with an apology for priority calls going through first. That, and not repeating the same voice message with the same distortion would improve effectiveness dramatically.
Resolving this problem is clearly a priority one issue. (after the bank holiday is over!)
God I almost pity salesdroids for the next few months. If everybody reading this article is thinking something along the lines of "dammit, why didn't I think of that" and implements things like this then life is going to get near unbearable for them.
You can suck out the pleasure factor from Floyd fans by giving them a dose of Polka Floyd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urAUcYJxKjc
It's worth persevering to the final guitar solo which really will surprise. Spot the use of pitch shift done perfectly.
For the a moment there, I thought I was listening to the intro to Gary Numan's My Breathing.
For the cheery, I'd have gone with 'magic roundabout' on a perpetual loop, I'm fairly sure the application of which, for a long enough period, would knock a significant number of IQ and sanity points...
If I wanted to creep people out, I'd choose one of Akira Yamaoka's compositions for Silent Hill.
When I think of the decades and hundreds of times I could have used this, a work of art.
Just for laughs they should find an Alfred E Newman lookalike and send him to something like Has Britain Got Talent auditions. ( Not sure if that's still going)
Released with the right video it could be a contender for the next Eurovision Song Contest.
I clicked, expecting to read an interview with a sysadmin in this place describing his success (despite being born out of wedlock).
I'd have written the headline as "Frustrated IT manager creates hellishly cruel and funny phone queue for sales weasels".
Probably a good thing I didn't go into journalism.
There's more than one Hell on Earth ;)
I wish the voiceover didn't have so many delays and stutters in it, just an occasional one here and there would be enough to be annoying without being so annoying that it was obvious it was deliberate.
I hope they programmed their voicemail system to log how long it took before callers transferred to that extension held before giving up. They could stage a competition trying different amounts of annoyingness to find that perfect balance to maximize the amount of wasted time on sales callers. Remember, salespeople work on commission; they'd be willing to listen to that message for an hour if it meant a fat commission! If you want to hit them where it hurts, make them waste time they could be using to call others.
You could also make it less obviously deliberate by having parts in which the call seems to be picked up - but then goes straight back on hold. Snippets of office chatter.
And for real fun... many years ago, back in the old Nokia feature phone days, when a recording on the phone could be played and the caller would hear it, one prank was to have a one sided conversation recorded, ring someone, and start the playback. Then crack up at the resulting conversation. Have a section or two like that, where the recorded side of the conversation eventually gets frustrated that they aren't talking to who they thought, and puts them back on hold.
Actually, I've just realised that I've only ever assumed it's no longer possible to put the phone on speaker and play something back.
I might have to experiment when it's not 11 o'clock at night!
If a recording can be played back while a phone call is active, this would be a good - or at least entertaining - solution to marketing calls on mobile phones.
Now there's an app I'd like to see, start the app, hit the "answer call" button and would begin their descent into hell, playing the hold message while you listen to their end and laugh. You could hit the "pretend to pick up" button every now and to give them the sound of it picking up, with office noises in the background, a couple beeps like the call is being transferred, and then back into hell.
Have it keep stats on how long you can make people stick around with different hold messages / music, which all app users can share and have a worldwide leaderboard with the records listed.
Now there's an app I'll pay 99 cents for. Heck, I'd have paid $49.99 for it a few months ago (or again a few months from now) when my landline was getting calls several times a year from campaign workers and pollsters. I'd have forwarded my number to my cell phone just so I could run that app and give them what they deserve! Would be money well spent for all the amusement value I'd derive from it, and the knowledge I was making political calls and polling that much less effective! Ignoring the calls doesn't waste nearly enough of their time.
Agreed -it's sufficiently bad that it's clearly a parody.
A few stutters/glitches (miss out _ word somewhere) and bad music with clipping and severe band filtering.
Then gently ramp the volume up and down, so the caller has to frequently adjust their volume controls...
Occasional "You are number " in the queue, please hold, your call will be answered soon...
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That is just gorgeous. I love it and hope I won't be infringing on anyone's copyright if I rip it off to add to our phone system. Hey, there's an idea! I'll bet you could sell this to businesses and make a fortune. Everyone hates these calls. I actually had someone call to market Blackberry software to me today. The number was similar enough to our Helpdesk's VOIP line that I made the mistake of answering it.
My other suggestion for music would be anything from Yoko Ono.
"My other suggestion for music would be anything from Yoko Ono."
I would have agreed with you until recently but then I heard some of her music on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone (Sunday nights 8pm BBC 6 Music pop pickers!) and quite enjoyed it.
Now if you'd said Coldplay...................................
I started here about 3 hours ago and ended up (via the random Brownian motion of the Internet) listening to the Hello This is Lenny bot on Youtube, which you just have to waste some time on.
Picture a senile old man with a hearing problem (and ducks) talking to the unfortunate telesales people and Indian Microsoft support people. This is absolutely hilarious.
Its not just a single audio file, but a fairly intelligent IVR system.
But a great concept...
Once upon a time, we purchased a little $3 button-like gadget that plugged into the phone line. Powered by the phone line. Press the button and it'd hold the line off-hook and then play a preprogrammed audio file down the line. The audio was first a 'Line Disconnected' tone, to convince robot dialers to hang up and strike the number from the list, followed by a voice announcement informing any humans that this line does not accept this type of call.
This button technology could be combined with this new audio creation, for the home market.
Since then we've got Caller ID.
Oh, the SoundCloud file just ended. I left it playing in the other browser tab. Got to the end, LOL.
Speaking of which, I've experienced two genuine hold audio instances which were very nearly as bad.
The first was the first few bars of The Beatles' "Help", on repeat. Now, this doesn't sound too bad, but I guarantee you that if you have to wait through it for 40 minutes because you have something critical that the company is providing, your brain will be liquefied in short order.
The second was an American company that have those peppy messages extolling the virtues of their product and support offerings interspersed with the hold music. It used to be that they would play the music for about 10-15 seconds, then give you a 10-second advert/message. Recently, they've changed it so it's more like 20 seconds of message separated by one second of music. And this company provides our core product, which breaks often.
My manager bought me pizza the last time I had to deal with that. He's gonna have to up the ante if it happens again.
...I suggested making a fictional employee called Scrimshaw Cantilever to "take" all the stupid shit. Except that he couldn't 'cause he was always out doing something (hopefully) bizarre - "Oh, you'll need to talk to Scrimshaw Cantilever but he's out for two weeks skiing in the Hamptons" or "Sorry he's getting a bikini wax now" or "He's doing something that's illegal in Utah *in Utah*, won't be back if he gets caught" etc.
Typically they go something like this (and you have to imagine I'm speaking in a monotone with absolutely no affect):
Me: Burn Toffering speaking
Caller: Can I speak to Burn Toffering? [Don't ask me why they do this. They always, always do it]
Me: [Long pause] Burn Toffering speaking
Caller: Hi, my name is Damien Scrod and I'm phoning from Advanced Cyberdianetics. How are you today Burn?
Me: [Longer pause] Good.
Caller: Err ... OK then. The reason I'm phoning today s to ask you, is your DNS fully protected against marsupial attacks? It would be great if I could come in and touch base with you about how Fortune 500 companies are using our solution to protect against this emerging threat vector. When would be a good time for you?
Me: [Long pause] No
Caller: Err ... OK. Well, I have a white paper with some case studies
Me, interrupting: Goodbye
I always feel quite chirpy after one of these calls. I'd love to know how Mr Scrod feels
Just down the tracks from here is a maintenance depot. So at night (when there are long gaps between passing trains) we get the trains shunting out really slowly from the depot and stopping right here to go through quite a range of maintenance regimes. The noises have to be heard to be believed.
Having just listened to the original, er, "song", much kudos to the member of your team who actually admitted to "having just the thing". I can only assume that he is medically certifiable...
And then, you achieved what I would have thought impossible. You made it worse! Absolute genius. It brought tears of laughter to my eyes. The fact that it also made my ears bleed was a side effect well worth putting up with for the laugh.
May your obviously, fertile and evil imaginations long continue.
Cheers... Ish
The original thing.
https://youtu.be/yu_W--kjhEo
Wow! It really is! So not the BoFH's own invention. Are they paying royalties, since it's not original?
Definitely sounds much better than the stuff they play in DIY stores, and distressingly often in supermarkets. Or indeed anything on the BBC's monument to mindlessness, Radio 2.
I love it, and feel motivated to spend Monday, sorry Tuesday creating something similar. Thank you.
My favourite sales call to date was:
Caller: Can I speak to the CIO please
Me: Sorry, the CIO is deceased
Caller: Wow, sorry to hear that. What is your position?
Me: The CIO
Caller: Gosh, sorry to bother you at this traumatic time. I'll call back. <click>
Just considering "You are number 5 in the queue, 4, 3, 2, 1, We are sorry that you have been on hold so long. Under our public service obligation we are transferring you to the priority queue. You are number 6 in the queue, 5, 4, 3......"
Lather, rinse and repeat as required.
These guys should get the Nobel Peace Prize for their outstanding work.
I once had to engineer a band this bad at an open air festival in Docklands back in the 90s. I ended up pulling the master faders all the way down thus leaving only the spill from the monitors wafting out—nobody noticed :)
I was *this* close to going out the back and dropping the stage mains. Stairway To Heaven with the guitar solo played a tritone (!) away from the root key is truly something to marvel at.
After listening through this again (and I still laughed hard), it reminded me of some of the John Peel sessions from the late 70's. These were the ones when punk was trying to work out where to go so there were some very odd music (I use the word music to define something with sounds in it).
Since the late, great Peel would never, ever crash the end of the song out of respect for the artists', he'd play this through the whole way and put some ever so slightly sarcastic, slightly nasal, comment at the end.
Ah, those were the days
Yes. This is good. Certainly.
But I tell you... I could make a better audio than this. I could make it as nail-curling as natwest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbz95LdqMko
... crossed with squarepusher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-nnHdj8fRg.
Complete with a labyrinth of numbered options yes.
Press 1 for more options, 2 to go back to where you were before, 3 for sales, 4 for... sales, 5 for... sales, 6 for legal.
There are no options, it just beeps at you like the button has been pressed for you.
Also, occasionally, like radio interference, there's a person saying "hello... hello... yes... that sounds great... you're cutting out... is anybody there?... is ANYBODY THERE?... hang on, let me transfer you to the other line"
Genius idea but it's worth noting that it won't be quite the deterrent you might expect.
Cold callers know that their job is worse than useless to the world at large and typically hate it. Except for the few who manage to turn luck or banter into money the rest are looking for any way possible to appear to be productive without being told to eff off 40 times an hour.
An indefinitely long phone call which you can legitimately put down to waiting on hold is perfect for padding the numbers, dreadful music or not.
Expect regular repeat visits from some poor souls who are on 'x hours per week of call time' type metrics.
I listened to the whole thing while getting through my morning emails. I spent the first half of it giggling. While listening to the second half, where the deep nuanced message of the artist(s) is revealed, I came to understand the nature of most of the emails that I receive.
The tenacity of sales reps who LIE in order to get through to someone is deserving of this tactic. Those sales reps give the software sales industry a bad rap.
However, to arbitrarily treat all sales reps this way is a real dick move. It is the real world and sometimes the SHTF. When it does and you need help this instant to keep your business running, you will be happy that you took a few of those sales calls. That way you have the relationships in place to expeditiously solve your problem.
Totally need to add an ALGO sip strobe or similar to this thing and mount it on the ceiling, let the queue ring/flash the strobe and every one in the office can be entertained while watching them be "burned in hell" with a good estimate of how long they stayed there.
(Some years ago) we'd gather round the C*O at the time who'd come up with creative ways to keep the salesperson busy. Sometime's we'd pass the call around through 5-10 people, great fun, anon for reasons. (Disclaimer: only for shifty unsolicited sales calls)
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