Please Hold
- Douglas Palermo
- Dec 29, 2025
- 4 min read
“We are all on hold with the universe, waiting for someone to pick up. The music that plays in the meantime is what we call life.” —Anonymous call-center philosopher
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1. The Loop
For ten years, Nikhil Halder tuned a single E chord into a kind of private religion.
He called the piece “My Music Nikhil,” partly because titles felt like tax returns, and partly because the phrase made him laugh. It began as a breathy synth pad he found in a thrift-store keyboard that smelled faintly of mall pretzels. He added a brushed-snare shuffle recorded with chopsticks on a pizza box. A four-note bass line looped with the serenity of a washing machine.
Every New Year’s Day, Nikhil returned to the session like a pilgrim to a shrine, tweaking the reverb decay, resampling the hi-hat through a ceramic mug, replacing one note in a MIDI arpeggio because it felt spiritually important.
Friends got jobs and children and cholesterol; Nikhil collected versions: My Music Nikhil_v42 Master FINAL real_FINAL this_one.wav.
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2. The Sale
By year ten, his song was an heirloom nobody wanted. Rent rose. Ray from the café said, “Buddy, you’re an artist. But your landlord’s an even better one—he paints with eviction notices.”
That night Nikhil googled how to monetize ambient hold music with the shame of a monk searching discount monk robes.
Two days later, a voice from “TelePortaVoice Solutions” called.
“Mr. Halder,” said Colm, an elevator wearing a tie, “Your work is...not unpleasant. Do you believe it can play indefinitely without provoking self-harm?”
“I—I think so,” said Nikhil.
The contract arrived by email. ℗ 2013 Nikhilweb.com. He signed while eating cereal, telling himself it was practical, even holy in its way—Jesus, he reasoned, would have licensed parables for audiobooks if necessary.
Two weeks later, My Music Nikhil became the official on-hold track for E-ZPass customer service across four states.
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3. The Outcry
He learned this not through royalties but via text:
Lila: DUDE. ARE YOU TORTURING PEOPLE FOR MONEY?
Attached was a voice memo: his brushed-snare pizza-box beat gliding under the polite hum of call-center chatter. The loop reset. And again. And again.
Online, strangers debated his soul:
“This haunted pan flute wants me to forgive my enemies and scream.”
“If I ever meet the person who made this, I’ll make him listen to me read my toll violations into his ear with a megaphone.”
Nikhil closed his laptop and opened a window. Somewhere, a car alarm performed an elegy.
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4. The Caller
Across the river, Tony DeSantis sat at a laminate desk, forty-nine minutes into the same loop.
He’d called about a toll violation that wasn’t his, endured “customer-focused support” that wasn’t either, and now this tranquil buzz dripped into his skull.
“What instrument is that?” he muttered. “A lullaby played on a humidifier?”
He could hang up. Instead he began anticipating the exact moment the loop restarted. He lived there now, in the one-second seam between loops where the world inhaled and forgot to exhale.
When a representative finally told him to call a different division, Tony’s patience sublimated into a mission.
Online sleuthing led him to an Instagram:
Trying to make something small and sincere.
— @NikhilHalderMusic
He DM’d: Call me. We gotta talk about your ring light in my ear for an hour.
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5. The Meeting
Rain greeted them at a diner midway between despair and Newark.
Tony recognized Nikhil not by face but by aura—the look of a man who’d recently apologized to a microwave for closing the door too hard.
“So,” Tony began, “I heard your song. A lot.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nikhil. “I mean, thank you. I mean—”
“I get it,” Tony said. “You gotta eat. World’s expensive. But that music…” He poked the air. “It put me in a state. Angry at first. Then weirdly calm. Like being trapped in a lavender candle. My rage got scented.”
“That’s the opposite of my artist statement,” Nikhil murmured.
They laughed nervously. Coffee refilled itself out of sympathy.
Tony softened. “I hummed it on the bus here. I hated myself for it. But it felt like a circle—like a hallway. Maybe you built that hallway to walk down it when everything else was too much.”
“I did,” Nikhil said quietly. “And then I rented it out.”
The rain eased. For the first time in years, Nikhil felt something uncoil—like the loop forgiving itself.
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6. The Seam
Nikhil suggested they listen together—one loop only. They shared earbuds like teenagers learning how to share oxygen.
The diner buzzed: plates, a baby with a straw wrapper, the quiet machinery of human waiting.
His brushed-snare tickled the room’s corners; the synth bells searched for courage. When the track ended and restarted, they both felt the seam—a hairline click where the world reset.
“There it is,” Tony said. “The doorway.”
“It’s always there,” Nikhil replied. “I kept trying to hide it. But it’s the only reason the loop isn’t a prison.”
The waitress brought pie because this clearly required pie.
Tony grinned. “You know what? I might call them back sometime. Stay on hold. Not to yell—to…practice patience. Is that nuts?”
“It is,” Nikhil said, “and it isn’t. Maybe the universe is a call center. Maybe we’re all on hold. The important thing is what we do between loops.”
They laughed. They ate pie. Rain turned to mist. When they parted, Tony said, “Make another one. Another dumb boat. With a bigger seam.”
Nikhil promised he would.
That night he opened a new session, named it My Music Nikhil II (Doorway Mix), and, for the first time in years, started with the seam.
Somewhere, a million callers waited, suspended between ring and voice, and for a fleeting moment, the hold music did its secret job— it made the waiting a place you could stand.
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Author’s Note
The genesis of “Please Hold” came from the real curiosity about a forgotten single—“My Music Nikhil,” released over a decade ago—and the strange afterlife that certain sounds acquire when they disappear into corporate machinery. This story treats that vanishing act as both tragedy and grace: a meditation on how art, once released, belongs to everyone, even the people who hate it most.
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