Somewhere in Australia, there lives a man with much more patience and determination than I.
Where I get angry and hang up in frustration when somebody leaves me on hold for 20 or 30 minutes, this guy stuck it out on hold with Qantas for 15 hours, 40 minutes and 1 second!
He was placed in a queue and told he’d be attended to “as soon as possible.”
“I wanted to find out what exactly they meant would be as soon as possible,” he said. “When it got to over two or three hours that was the point where it was like: ‘OK let’s ride this out'”.
So what did he do all that time? Surfed the web, took a nap and caught up on some reading.
“I also managed to read Bazerman & Moore’s seventh edition of Judgment in Managerial Decision Making — more than 200 pages of advanced master’s level reading,” he said.
But eventually, even the hardest of the hardcore can take no more.
“I hung up in the end simply because I had had enough,” he said.
Yes, after all that time he didn’t even get to talk to anybody. Even better, he eventually came to find out that he hadn’t been booked on the flight to New York that he was trying to confirm because of an error in the reservation system.
Qantas, not surprisingly, has no idea how this could happen and aren’t completely sure at this point if it did.
Qantas says it’s investigating, but that it had yet to find a record of the man’s marathon wait.
“In fact, our average contact centre wait time during that period was under a minute and the longest wait time was 17 minutes,” a spokesman said.
The story does have somewhat of a happy ending, I suppose. the fellow says that he’s been put back on the flight he wanted, and that if he can prove through phone records that he seriously did wait on the phone all that time, Qantas will reimburse him for his call, whatever that involves.
