ASK some typical BT customers what they think of Britain's incumbent telecoms company, and you are liable to hear the usual grumbles about engineers who do not show up, broadband connections that fail to work, and touch-tone customer-service menus that lead to endless hold-music.
WITH their irritating menu trees and endless holding for the next available operator, call centres are one of the bugbears of modern life.
The halls were dingy, he continued; security guards were everywhere, accompanied occasionally by a shackled patient from the local prison; and the waiting rooms were veritable dens of human misery, filled with patients and their families stuck in endless holding patterns.
Such requests put the students and postdocs into endless holding loops, where for months, or sometimes even more, they are performing reviewer experiments, in many cases orthogonal to where scientific judgment might say the research should be going, or where we would like it to go.
The United States Senate was supposed to have dropped its insidious tradition that let members put endless secret holds on nominations and other important matters.
There are many causes for the dysfunction: strident partisanship, unyielding ideology, a corrosive system of campaign financing, gerrymandering of House districts, endless filibusters, holds on executive appointees in the Senate, dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.
As a result, the endless unpaid holds that have become more and more commonplace in television have now been addressed in the MBA (minimum basic agreement) for the first time ever".
Soldiers have practiced endless hours to hold their rifles at precisely the same level.
Chávez, a charismatic performer with seemingly endless energy, would hold marathon weekly television appearances during which he sang, cajoled, hectored.
