Just so you know: long hold times are by design, and not related to surges in calls or unintentional understaffing. Many companies learned to shift the labor of such interactions onto customers to save costs. Adding to that, companies that engage in such behavior are usually horrendous to deal with and work for, so they have high staffing turnovers which means if you actually do speak with a human, they won’t be able to help and may just hang up on you.

To reiterate: this is by design and carefully planned out to be this exact way. You sitting on hold for 30 mins saves the company money. Now multiply that by hundreds of thousands of calls.