Tim Dowling: this hold music is stuck on repeat – like my life

The piccolo tune could only have been written to intentionally drive people completely crazy

I’m sitting in the kitchen with my phone on speaker, listening to an instrumental work featuring a repeated piccolo melody, as I have been for the last half hour. At first it seemed to be a composition without end, cagily constructed to fold back on itself, but after giving it close attention for some minutes I realise it’s just a short section of a larger piece – comprising the four bars before the drums kick in, and the four bars after – that lasts exactly 30 seconds. At the end of the loop it briefly cuts out before starting over again, leaving a silent gap that makes you think a customer service representative is about to speak. But that never happens.

Around the 45 minute mark I make a quick calculation – twice per bar, 8 bars per 30-second cycle – that suggests I have now listened to the repeated piccolo melody more than 1,400 times. It’s hard to imagine this work being devised with any intention beyond driving people – perhaps prisoners – insane.

Suddenly the music stops in the wrong place.

“Thank you for calling our customer service team,” says a voice. “How can I help you today?”

“Um, yeah,” I say, rising slowly from my trance, “I got a text saying my package has been delivered, and it absolutely hasn’t.”

I think: you had 45 minutes to come up with a better opening.

“I’m very sorry to hear that you haven’t received your parcel,” says the voice. “Can I take your name and the first line of your address?”

I’ve been hovering in the kitchen since I got a text saying my parcel would be delivered between 2pm and 3pm, and for the two hours after that when it still hadn’t arrived. Then at 5pm I got a text saying it had been left with “neighbour” along with a photo that looked suspiciously like my parcel sitting on the bonnet of a van.

“I checked with my neighbours,” I say, “and they didn’t take it.”

“Can I call you Tim?” says the voice.

“Sure,” I say.

With eerie acquiescence, I agree to be put on hold again. A few minutes later the voice returns to say that the depot is not answering the phone. She will have to call me back.

I decide to check with my other nearest neighbour – the man who runs the small auto body shop directly behind my office shed. We rarely see each other because we are separated by a tall brick wall.

“They didn’t come down here,” he says, but he is, if anything, more concerned about the parcel than I am. He escorts me to another front door and knocks on my behalf, to no avail. He shows me the considerable CCTV coverage he can access from his phone, fast-forwarding through the half hour either side of 5pm. No couriers appear.

“He was incredibly helpful,” I tell my wife later. “Unlike the helpline, who never called me back.”

“It’s good for you to meet new people,” she says.

“He told me that sometimes at the end of the day the drivers flag leftover parcels as delivered so they still get paid,” I say. “He’s really seen it all.”

“I think I’ve heard enough about your parcel now,” she says.

The next morning I spend another 30 minutes with the piccolo. Eventually, a service representative answers and then tells me a story I don’t understand: either the courier involved was holiday cover, or he was the regular courier who has now gone on holiday. I’m reluctant to express my confusion, because sometimes you can get transferred to a special helpline for old people.

The morning after that my wife wakes me at 7am with a question she already knows the answer to.

“Did you do the bins?” she says.

“Shit,” I say.

I’m dragging the recycling to the kerb in boots without socks when a car slows as it passes. The passenger window rolls down, and I peer in: it’s the man from the body shop.

“Did you get your parcel?” he says.

“No,” I say. “I think I’m waiting for the courier to get back from holiday.”

“Crazy,” he says, shaking his head.

My wife is waiting for me on the doorstep in her pyjamas.

“What was all that about?” she says.

“He cares,” I say. “Somebody cares.”

A sunny morning, a week later: I’m beginning to find the piccolo quite soothing. Suddenly a voice interrupts the music and speaks from a script I now know off by heart.

“Yes, my name is Tim,” I say. “And this is my seventh phone call.”