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When an Australian businessman called up his national airline at 7:22pm on Wednesday, an automated message told him an operator would be with him "as soon as possible." But no one ever picked up; instead, he stayed on the line until 11:01am the next morning and finally hung up, he says. Why did Andrew Kahn stay on the line so long? "When it got to over two or three hours that was the point where it was like, 'OK, let's ride this out,'" he tells the Telegraph.
The 15-hour, 40-minute wait was long enough that he could have flown to his destination, New York. Instead, he spent the time surfing the Internet and reading a textbook called Judgment in Managerial Decision Making, "more than 200 pages of advanced master's level reading," he says. When he called back after hanging up, it was only to learn that an error meant he wasn't booked on his planned flight. Qantas has fixed that problem, and disputes the hold story, saying it has no record of such a wait but is looking into it.
