O'Driscoll and Please Hold

O'Driscoll blog; witty and insightful

This article picks up on some of the underlying currents in O’Driscoll’s work.

In his infuriating experience of an automated telephone system, O’Driscoll finds a

deeper metaphor for modern life. He is trapped in a world of binary response where any

deviation from the set script is met with incomprehension or delay. In his use of

repetition, O’Driscoll creates a horrible maze of language full of wrong turns and dead

ends. Language is reduced to a banality bordering on the meaningless. It has become

purely operational with no room for anomaly or shades of meaning. The irony is that,

should the narrator manage to bypass the system and get through to a real person,

they will treat him in just as robotic a fashion.

The poem has a kind of desperate comedy about it – funny but with a darker undertone,

partly due to the repeated insistence that ‘this is the future’. Whether by that is meant

the dominance of automation in our daily lives, the failure of language to communicate

what we need or the confusions of old age, or all of the above, isn’t made explicit.

However, it’s clear the narrator takes a dim view of the future if this is what it means.

This view is made increasingly clear by the narrator’s internal ‘translator’ who starts to

present alternative, sarcastic meanings to the phrases offered by the automated voice.

The mention of ‘looting’ also brings in the outside world briefly, hinting that the

narrator’s impotence in the face of this system has its parallel in how access to money –

and power – is tightly controlled at a societal level.

The deeper implications of the incident are borne out in the final three lines, set apart

from the rest of the text. Their progression from ‘hold’ to ‘old’ to ‘cold’ is a powerful

warning that a whole life might pass by while you wait for the answer you need.