“Let me look at our refund policy. OK if I put you on a brief hold?”
“No, no. I prefer you put me on a long hold.”
“Sir?”
“Yeah, no. Put me on a hold for the ages. Put me on a hold that reflects Halley’s lazy loop through the solar system. Here’s Earth, here’s the Sun, zip past Mercury, dodge Neptune decades later then slowly, slowly, arc that U-turn and come back our way, so my grandson can see you in the night sky.
“Put me on a hold measured in millenia. Start with Cro-Magnons huddled in caves, fleeing the unstoppable glaciers grinding their way down from the north, then melt those glaciers, evolve those Cro-Magnons to Homo sapiens. And put those men in mud and wattle huts, then wooden cabins, then stone castles, then steel skyscrapers.
“I want a hold that feels the bump and grind of tectonic plates, scraping and shoving an ocean bottom, littered with seashells, until that ocean bottom becomes a mountain top – swept by icy monsoons and littered with oxygen tanks and those too foolish to turn back when their own oxygen ran out. And now the mountaineer and the seashell lie together.
“Give me a hold where the sun shines down on a tennis match, a picnic, a walk in the woods, and extends through that same sun becoming a red giant. No longer so inviting to tennis players, picnickers, or sylvan strollers.
“I want a hold that poets immortalize in Alexandrian quatrain, playwrights fill Broadway theaters with, and Tom Cruise hopes to turn into Mission Impossible: Nine.
“Let’s not make this a vanilla hold, a 50th percentile hold, a ‘meh’ hold. When people hear of this hold, I want them to gnash their teeth, to rend their garments, to keen so shrilly that windows shatter for three blocks around.
“Can you put me on that kind of hold?
“Yeah, um, we’ll just credit you the four dollar refund sir.”
“I’m happy to stay on the line for a brief survey, if you like.”
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