You may want to be careful what you say while on hold.

It is the opening line on so many phone conversations these days: This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.

The taped message is so common that many callers might assume that no one is ever listening, let alone taking notes. But they would be wrong.

Monitoring is intended to track the performance of call center operators, but the professional snoops are inadvertently monitoring callers, too. Most callers do not realize that they may be taped even while they are on hold.

It is at these times that monitors hear husbands arguing with their wives, mothers yelling at their children, and dog owners throwing fits at disobedient pets, all when they think no one is listening. Most times, the only way a customer can avoid being recorded is to hang up.

Actually, I’ve suspected this to be the case and I use the hold time (especially when they have some stupid advertisement playing in the background) to get in a few jibes about the ads or about the stupid phone mazes they make you navigate before you can get to a real person.  I also like to make comments about the stupid robots that make you talk in the hopes that the monitors will eventually pick up on the fact that they’re alienating their customers by foisting us off on these chatty-Cathy machines.

Link via Slashdot.