Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Spooky Strings, Phone Menu Options, and Eye Rolls

Summary

Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Spooky Strings, Phone Menu Options, and Eye Rolls

Podcast: Slow Burn (Decoder Ring segment)
Host: Willa Paskin
Date: May 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Decoder Ring is a listener mailbag, tackling three intriguing cultural mysteries submitted by fans. Host Willa Paskin and her team investigate:

1. The origins of a distinct eerie string sound in horror movies
2. Why customer service phone lines always tell you to "listen carefully as menu options may have changed"
3. The surprising history and meaning of the eye roll gesture

Through expert interviews, historical context, and delightful detours, the episode uncovers deeper meanings behind everyday phenomena, all with plenty of curiosity and humor.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

[00:06–05:42] Preview: Slow Burn Season 11 — “Becoming Justice Gorsuch”

A quick conversation with Susan Matthews, host of the upcoming Slow Burn season, about how Neil Gorsuch’s appointment marked a pivotal era for the Supreme Court, exploring his unexpected judicial idiosyncrasies.

Highlights:

• Gorsuch’s ascent coincides with a broken and dramatically empowered Supreme Court (01:30–02:33)
• Known as a legal “wild card,” especially in cases like LGBTQ+ rights and Native American issues (03:12–04:06)
• The need to see justices as complex characters, not just as oracles of the law (04:54–05:34)

Notable Quote:

“He is so committed to his legal theories that he isn't just a partisan ruling with the conservatives every single time... if it wasn't so far towards the conservatives, it's Neil Gorsuch who would be the wild card.” — Susan Matthews (02:39)

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[05:56–30:21] Mailbag Q1: The Spooky String Sound in Horror Films

The Listener’s Mystery:

Listener Josh Griffey describes a haunting "string plucking" motif he keeps hearing in horror films. He wants to know where this sound comes from and how it became so iconic. (06:59–10:19)

Key Investigation Steps:

• Producer Alex Evan Chung plays examples from "Us," "The X-Files," and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to confirm the motif’s consistency (14:18–15:12)
• Interview with musicologist Frank Hentschel (15:25–16:42): traces the sound’s origin to avant-garde classical music, specifically Krzysztof Penderecki’s postwar experiments with "extended techniques"
• Eli Spindel, conductor (19:37–23:48), demonstrates how these string techniques—plucking, tapping, bowing unconventionally—build up the uncanny effect

How It Entered Pop Culture:

• Penderecki’s "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" (1961) introduced these sonorities
• Horror filmmakers borrowed these eerie string effects as a sonic metaphor for the breakdown of normal reality (16:06–17:00)
• Milestone film: "The Exorcist" (1973) used Penderecki’s music explicitly (24:46–25:59)
• Stanley Kubrick’s "The Shining" took it further, creating almost a "horror opera" with 45 minutes of near-continuous Penderecki textures (26:17–27:41)
• Now, Penderetsky-inspired music "is baked into scary movies" from the art house to the multiplex

Expert Insight:

• The horror comes partly from the mix of the familiar (traditional string instruments) and the alien (extended techniques), producing "the uncanny" (28:32–29:27)

Notable Quotes:

"It's not any one thing. It's a bunch of string players divided into groups, each simultaneously executing a different sequence of plucking, tapping, bowing in the wrong place and striking the strings with the wrong side of the bow. Put it all together and the effect is to make your skin crawl." — Alex Evan Chung (23:48)

"Because I think if you listen to it very closely and analyze it, you find these hidden connections. They're somehow inscribed—some elements from the music which is so familiar to us…" — Frank Hentschel (28:32)

Memorable Moment:

• The realization that the most unsettling sound in horror comes from the world of high-minded classical experimentation, not B-movie sound studios

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[32:23–43:50] Mailbag Q2: “Please Listen Carefully as Our Menu Options Have Changed”

The Listener’s Mystery:

Nick Hollander wonders why customer service lines universally say "our menu options have changed," even though they rarely (if ever) actually do.

Investigation Path:

• Historian Nick Green; he first encountered pre-recorded phone menus in 1957, but automated touch-tone menus only exploded in the ‘70s–‘80s (35:16–36:15)
• Menu messages caught public ire by the late ‘90s, with hardly anyone sure if menu options ever actually changed (36:15–37:10)
• Industry insiders, like Andy Benochet of Holdcom (39:03–41:57), confirm the phrase is mostly pointless—clients insist on using it due to inertia and mimicry
• The phrase likely began as a way to "make people listen" instead of smashing '0' to reach an operator (40:59–41:15)

Expert Insight:

• All the experts agree: it’s just a "baked-in" industry cliche with little practical value.

Notable Quotes:

"They just want to get to a person, you know, so totally." — Andy Benochet (39:42)

"It was probably an attempt to make people listen to the options more. They probably were getting feedback like people don't even listen... Let's make it important. Let's say things have changed and they need to listen." — Andy Benochet (40:59)

Memorable Moment:

• The phrase’s ubiquity is compared to a herd: “It’s acting like an unconscious bison in a giant herd marching across the fruited plain…” — Nick Green (42:32)

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[45:17–56:38] Mailbag Q3: The Origin of the Eye Roll

The Listener’s Mystery:

Jade from Brooklyn asks: Where did the eye roll come from? Who invented it, and how did it come to mean what it does today?

Key Investigation Steps:

• Linguist Rebecca Clift (University of Essex) studies “embodiment”, collecting video examples of eye rolls in daily life and media (46:46–48:35)
• Historical research shows that in classical, medieval, and even early modern texts, "eye rolling" denoted intense emotion—grief, terror, lust—NOT the meaning we use today (51:27–53:49)
• As late as the 1970s–early 80s, the exasperated, "oh brother" eye roll was not yet common; so new that the Washington Post explained the gesture’s meaning to readers in 1987 (54:04–54:14)
• The modern, dismissive eye roll is barely 40 years old, possibly first appearing in black literature (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937) and becoming mainstream among teenage girls, especially via ‘80s "Valley Girl" stereotypes (55:30–56:09)
• Today, it's universal, potent, and concise: a quick, off-the-record protest that "turns us into monsters" in the best way (56:40)

Notable Quotes:

"The eye roll turns out to be a protest, a sort of off the record protest to something that's just been said or done." — Rebecca Clift (49:48)

"It’s so effective and lethal in the sense we immediately know that here is protest, disapproval, whatever, and it’s over in half a second." — Rebecca Clift (50:20)

"I mean, I guess I just want to underscore here, like, what you're saying is, basically, it seems as if the eye roll, like, was not a common feature of how humans communicate before the 1980s." — Willa Paskin (54:45)

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• 00:42–05:34 — Preview: "Becoming Justice Gorsuch" with Susan Matthews
• 06:59–10:19 — Listener describes the mysterious “spooky string sound”
• 14:18–15:12 — Producer and listener confirm horror string examples
• 15:25–23:48 — Musicologists and conductor explain origins and techniques of the horror string sound
• 24:46–27:41 — “The Exorcist,” “The Shining,” and mainstreaming avant-garde horror music
• 32:23–33:11 — Listener laments the endless menu message
• 35:16–37:10 — History of automated phone menus and the catchphrase
• 39:03–41:57 — Industry inside scoop: The menu warning is pointless, no one changes menus that often
• 45:23–48:35 — Linguist begins collecting eye rolls, explains gesture’s context
• 51:27–54:45 — Eye roll in historical texts vs. the newly-minted “protest gesture”
• 55:30–56:09 — Connection to black literature, teenage girls, and modern meaning

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Memorable Quotes

• “This sound really is baked into scary movies.”—Alex Evan Chung (15:12)
• “He made an eerie, disturbing, frightening sonic weave that no one had ever heard before.”—Alex Evan Chung, on Penderecki (18:39)
• “You’re not gonna be caught inside the phone for the rest of your life because you press the wrong button.”—Nick Green (34:19)
• “It’s just become kind of like a baked in type thing.”—Andy Benochet (40:52)
• “The eye roll turns out to be a protest, a sort of off the record protest to something that’s just been said or done.”—Rebecca Clift (49:48)
• “So the fact that that's explained [in 1987] suggests it wasn't an instantly familiar expression at the time.”—Rebecca Clift (54:14)

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Tone & Final Thoughts

The episode is playful, methodical, and crammed with expert testimony and pop-culture references. The team treats even silly irritations with seriousness, making the resulting answers feel both illuminating and delightful. Whether decoding the unnerving shimmer of ghostly violins, demystifying a bureaucratic cliché, or tracing the teenage evolutionary leap of the eye roll, the team brings scholarly rigor and a palpable delight in everyday mysteries.

For new and returning listeners, “Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Spooky Strings, Phone Menu Options, and Eye Rolls” is a treasure trove of unexpected backstories lurking behind the culture we take for granted.

Transcript

[A]

Hi, it's Willa. For those of you who discovered Decoder Ring through Slow Burn, I've got some exciting news for you before we share our latest episode. It's a Preview of season 11 of Slow Burn Becoming Justice Gorsuch, which premieres on May 13th. The new trailer is dropping here tomorrow. And today I'm speaking with Susan Matthews, who's the host of Slow Burn Becoming Justice Gorsuch. Many of you may remember her as the host of the award winning seventh season of Slow Burn, Roe v. Wade. And she's here to talk about the new season with me. Hi, Susan.

[B]

Hi, Willa.

[A]

Okay, so tell me about this new season.

[B]

So we're doing Slow Burn Becoming Justice Gorsuch. And the reason we picked this topic is because the government is really messed up right now. We all know that. We hear about all the problems all the time. But there's one place that is doing a lot. That place is the Supreme Court. And we really think that this season is going to help you understand why the Supreme Court is putting out all these decisions that really have the most effect on American policy compared to everything else. And we're also going to talk about kind of the personalities of the justices on the court, particularly Neil Gorsuch.

[A]

So, I mean, when I think of Neil Gorsuch, I have to be honest that I don't like, he doesn't strike me as like the flashiest most. He doesn't jump out to me as like, obviously fascinating. So, like, why do Neil Gorsuch, like, why focus on him?

[B]

The reason for that is because the moment where Neil Gorsuch ascends to the Supreme Court is in fact the moment that the court is basically broken and also takes on this new valence of power in our government. And by that I mean you might remember Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, which was extremely contentious. You might remember Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But what happens with Neil Gorsuch is that he's the one that, that takes the seat that had been Antonin Scalia's and Scalia had died when Barack Obama was still president. Obama tries to nominate Merrick Garland and Republicans just stonewall, stonewall, stonewall for months and months and months until the election, until Trump is elected the first time. And Neil Gorsuch is the one that takes that seat. And that is a huge shift in the power dynamics for the Supreme Court. It's a totally unprecedented blockade and grab of power. And that's really the moment that we understand started this modern Supreme Court era.

[A]

And, and then tell me, like, about Gorsuch. Like, so he's this pivotal figure, but is he, like, interesting in and of himself?

[B]

He is interesting. He is pretty much a law professor kind of nerd, and we'll talk about that. But the thing about him that's interesting is that he is so committed to his legal theories that he isn't just a partisan ruling with the conservatives every single time. We have a 6, 3 court right now. But if it wasn't so far towards the conservatives, it's Neil Gorsuch who would be the wild card. He's the one who's doing the most surprising things. He's the one who is the most unpredictable.

[A]

So, like, what is he a wild card about?

[B]

So one of the most famous ones in 2020, he wrote the ruling in this case called Bostock, where he argued for strong protections for gay and trans workers. It was kind of this landmark case that many people said was the biggest protective ruling for trans people in history and the biggest gay people since Obergefell. And Republicans were really, really mad at him about it. And he was just kind of like, this is what the law should be. So this term, one of the big cases that we're waiting on is the trans sports cases of saying, you know, can people play sports on the gender that they believe themselves to be? And which way Gorsuch is going to go is very up in the air and I think is very interesting.

[A]

He's also sort of famously like the guy who is the most liberal about Native American issues. Right. That's the thing I know about him, basically.

[B]

And people say that that's because he's a Westerner and he is from Colorado and he had the first Native American clerk on the high court. And he is by far the furthest left of any justice ever on the court on Native American rights. And there are real reasons for that. And it has to do with his specific legal philosophy, which is something that we all have to understand in order to understand what's going on with this court. And that's what we're going to get into on the.

[A]

So this series, which I'm really excited to listen to, is it part of, like, maybe I'm cheating here? Because I know that it is. But I want you to tell all our listeners, is this part of, like, a larger philosophy about how we should be treating the people that are actually on the Supreme Court? Because I think historically we've sort of been very respectful and gloves on and like, they're sort of above all of us, they're special.

[B]

There's a super weird dynamic about how people think about the justices on the high court, and it's very formal and it's totally ludicrous. These people, which you can see from how Neil Gorsuch got onto the court, they're political actors and they have tons and tons of power over our lives. And we don't think of them as politicians. We don't treat them as characters to analyze in the way that we analyze our presidents or our senators. But I really think that in order to understand what's happening to our country and why these things are happening, you need to understand these people as characters and not just as these justices who are reading the law. I'm pumped. I'm there.

[A]

I hope everyone else is too. It's premiering on May 13, and you can hear the trailer here tomorrow. Thank you, Susan, so much for talking to me.

[B]

Thank you, Willa.

[A]

Josh Griffey is a Dakota rig listener from St. Louis, Missouri. And years ago, he had an experience that terrified him.

[C]

I have this very vivid memory of as a freshman in college and I went to see a movie that I think is basically forgotten. It's called Mama.

[D]

Where is she now?

[A]

Is she here in this house?

[B]

Mama, stop it.

[A]

You promised.

[C]

As an 18 year old, I watched this movie in the movie theater and I was terrified out of my mind. I was so scared. I remember walking back to my dorm and scared that something was gonna jump out at me. I had trouble sleeping and so I just sort of swore off the whole thing. Just the whole. I guess that's just not for me.

[A]

He was sure he was done with horror movies for good. But then five or six years ago, Josh began seeing the person he's dating now. And love does some funny things.

[C]

She was a big horror movie person. She made a case where like, no, like, you gotta at least watch Freddie and Jason and Michael Myers. You gotta know what these are, you know, and sort of converted me to the lifestyle.

[A]

Soon he wasn't just watching horror movies, he was watching all the horror movies.

[C]

Between her wanting to show me everything and me wanting to see everything, it's like, well, now we have to do all the mascot horrors. Like we have to. Can you say, have you seen the horror movies until you've seen like all three Jason's that you need to see to see Jason, that is as Jason is, you know.

[A]

So Josh is all in on horror now. He watches classics, he watches trash, he watches everything. And while doing so, he began to hear something so often, something so eerie in the soundtrack of these films that he felt compelled to email us about it.

[C]

I noticed that, like, sometimes when there's something creepy, but especially like a ghost kind of creepy, there's this, like, string plucking thing that happens. And I'm an engineer, I'm not a musician. I couldn't describe it very well in words, but there's this, like, tinkly clink sort of like plucking sound, but it's not like psycho violin, like, eek, eek, eek, eek, eek, you know?

[A]

Yeah, totally. So when you send the email, my mind immediately was like, oh, he's talking about the eee, eek, ee thing. And then only when I read more closely, it was like, oh, no, he's talking about some other thing. That is not the same cliche.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So, like, you did, like, a flinky. What was the thing you did?

[B]

A flinky.

[A]

Tinkle.

[C]

Tinkle. Yeah.

[A]

Okay, so what do you think? Like, if you had to put this musical thing into order, like, what. How would you try to describe to someone?

[C]

It sounds like someone, like, plucking the strings on a string instrument. It sounds like it's just, like, with the ends of their nails, just like,

[B]

bink, bink, bink, bink, bink.

[C]

But, like, really fast, like, tinka, Tinka, Tinka, Tinka, Tinka, Tinka, Tinka, Tinka. I know it's something, but I can't name it.

[A]

Josh was sure this sound was happening all the time in scary movies and in trailers, but because he couldn't name it or remember specific examples of where he'd heard it, Google was no great help. He kept trying, though, using all sorts of different combinations of search terms on YouTube, like creepy plucking sound and horror movie ghost sound. And finally he came across a sound effect titled one word, all in lowercase scary violins.

[C]

I was like, that's it. That's the one. Even hearing it just now, like, sans context, I'm like, yeah, the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up a little bit as I'm listening to this.

[A]

What does it conjure for you that

[C]

means there's a ghost, but you haven't seen it yet. Like, that's kind of the vibe I get.

[A]

It's always ghosts.

[C]

It makes me think of ghosts. I mean, when I hear it back just now, I'm like, this kind of makes me think of spiders. It puts me ill at ease. Like, I am in a place with something that shouldn't be here. Makes me feel like I need to be aware of what's around me because something is going to happen.

[A]

As satisfying as it was to finally find the sound effect in a YouTube video, Josh still didn't know how the sound was made, where it came from, or how it became embedded in the language of horror films. But at least now he had a concrete example of it, something he could share and send to the kind of people who might become as obsessed as him and get some answers, people like us.

[C]

Because it was really bugging me that I was like, I know I've heard this before. I know this is like a go to. But I'm like, how did we settle on this? Where did it come from?

[A]

And you just needed to know.

[C]

And I just had to know.

[A]

Do you have any guesses?

[C]

No, I really, I don't think anything would surprise me other than Josh. This is a totally made up phenomenon. You're, you know, and I feel like I'm insulated from that by the fact that we're doing this call.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Josh is absolutely right. We have an answer to his question and two more besides, because today is Mailbag day. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin and in this episode we're answering some fantastic questions we're lucky enough to have received from you, our listeners. To start, we'll get into the unexpectedly elevated origins of that eerie horror film musical motif. And then we'll be looking at why companies insist on telling callers to listen closely to menu options that could not possibly have changed. And finally, we'll wrap up with the surprisingly recent rise of an indispensable gesture. All that thanks to you. So today on Decoder Ring, let's jump into the mailbag.

[E]

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[B]

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[A]

So horror movies scare the bejesus out of me. I watch them through my fingers, if I'm watching them at all. I haven't seen nearly enough to know the sound our listener Josh was talking about. And so for help, I brought our supervising producer Alex Evan Chung into the conversation.

[F]

So like, first of all, I wanted proof of concept for Willa to show that Josh is not crazy. So here is for example, the trailer for Jordan Peele's U.S. where's Jason? Tell me if this is sort of what you're thinking of.

[C]

Oh yeah, like right before the logo hits. That's exactly it.

[D]

Great, great.

[F]

This is from season one of the X Fil.

[C]

Oh yeah.

[F]

Okay. And there's one more. This is not from a horror movie, but because you mentioned spiders, here is classic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[A]

See ya.

[C]

Is it 100% like creepy horror movie thing? I mentioned spiders. It's in Raiders with Spiders. Like yeah, it's 100% the thing I'm thinking of.

[F]

Okay, so confirmed. Josh is not hallucinating. This sound really is baked into scary movies. And to figure out how that happened, where it came from, I reached out to someone I thought might know.

[G]

Yeah, my name is Frank Henschel and I'm historical musicologist at the University of Cologne.

[F]

And one of Frank's areas of research is the music of horror films. So I played him the scary sound effect video that Josh found on YouTube to see what it brought to mind.

[G]

Yeah, well, it's a very typical track, which I know from many horror films,

[F]

but he recognized it from somewhere else too.

[G]

This is a kind of music which originated in the late 50s, early 60s, where composers experimented with composing a music totally different to what is familiar to us.

[F]

It turns out the answer to Josh's question about what this sound is and where it comes from doesn't begin in the world of horror movies, a genre often derided as low brow and schlocky. Instead, it begins in the most highbrow place imaginable in the world of post war experimental avant garde classical music. In the wake of the cataclysm that was World War II, many composers couldn't go back to the old tonal music, romantic music. It didn't make sense anymore, not after the devastation and horror they'd all just lived through.

[G]

Many of the composers explicitly see their own music as a social critique, always breaking taboos, always seeking for ways of making music which differ from what is established in society.

[F]

They began to experiment wildly with mathematical structures, with electronics, and with creating sounds like nothing ever heard before. And in that goal, few were as successful as the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.

[A]

My avant garde was really very avant garde. We were rebelling.

[F]

This is penderecky in a 2013 interview.

[H]

We wanted, the young people wanted to

[A]

be different, to write, to forget the past, to build a future.

[F]

Penderecky seemingly did away with almost all the components that we think of as music, things like melody, harmony, rhythm, meter. Instead, what he focused on was texture. You can get a sense of what I mean by listening to Penderecky's most famous piece of from 1961, named after a real life horror. It's called Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. And he begins with an instruction to all 52 string, essentially to play the highest note they can as loud as possible. Then it moves on to the next texture, one that's quieter and kind of seasick. And soon comes a percussive texture, which I think you might recognize.

[G]

Most people who are not specialized in new music, and most people aren't, they will think about the horror film instantly, I think.

[F]

But when this sound, the sound Josh was curious about, shows up in a horror movie, Frank Henschel clocks instantly where it came from originally.

[G]

It sounds very much like Krzysztof Penderecki

[F]

with his Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima. Penderecki was sculpting a soundscape that would memorialize an act of violence never before witnessed by humanity. And I think he succeeded. He made an eerie, disturbing, frightening sonic weave that no one had ever heard before. But why is it so unsettling? Why is it so effective at being creepy? Well, that has a lot to do with how he actually makes that sound. And for that, I turn to Eli Spindel. Eli is the conductor of the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, which just performed this piece in concert in April.

[I]

What drew me to it is it is totally unique. This challenges you as a performer. It's a kind of puzzle also.

[F]

So I asked him to come into our studio with his violin for a demonstration, because a key part of Penderecky's sound comes from having his musicians play their instruments unusually, using what are called extended techniques.

[I]

Extended techniques are basically playing the violin in non traditional ways, ways that you didn't learn in your Suzuki books. You know, percussive ways, ways that sound gritty or dirty or eerie and scary and all like playing wrong, essentially.

[F]

So let's starting with, like, the stuff you are taught. Like, what are the conventional ways? What are the basic ways that you learn how to play violin?

[I]

Sure. I mean, your basic bow stroke is a means of delivering the perfect amount of pressure, speed. And you're working with the contact point, which is where the hair of the bow hits the strings. Put it right between the bridge and the fingerboard, you get that nice sound, you know.

[F]

But if you start to deviate from that perfect speed and pressure and contact point, things start to get a little

[I]

funky, go too light. You get what's called flautondo, Just, you know, the bow floats over the thing. And that's using speed but not pressure. And if you have pressure but not speed, you get, I should have given a warning.

[F]

So you're pressing hard, but like bowing

[I]

slowly, pressing hard and bowing slow gives you that. So that's kind of the various things that you can do with pressure. And then you can vary the contact point, which is where the bow hits the strings. And the most common one, which goes way back, is Sol Ponticello. It means like on the bridge, you know, the bridge is the thing that's holding up the strings, and that gives it the kind of metallic edge,

[D]

A

[I]

kind of alienating effect or distortion kind of thing. Those are accidents at the beginning that you were trying to avoid. But if you're doing an extended technique, they become things that you can work with.

[F]

And Krzysztof Penderetsky Loved working with these things. He didn't invent them all. Even Beethoven used an extended technique here and there for a momentary decoration. But Penderecki made them the focus of the entire work, layering them to create tone colors never heard before. Which meant he had to invent new ways to notate them, too. If you look at one of his scores, they don't really look like normal sheet music. They can look more like readouts of brain activity, which is actually what he based some of his music on. Instead of giving the performers the usual staff marked with specific notes to play, he gave them a loose set of often cryptic instructions to follow.

[I]

He asks for a very slow vibrato with a 1/4 tone frequency difference, produced by sliding the finger. So it'll be like. Penderetsky asks you to play between bridge and tailpiece. That's the wrong side of the bridge, and he's telling you to do things like tremolo on it, which is when you move the bow very, very fast back and forth. The next one is percussion effects. Strike the upper sounding board of the violin with the nut or the fingertips, where you're just tapping, physically tapping on

[F]

just the wood itself, tapping.

[I]

If I had fingernails, if I had longer fingernails, the sound would be different. You can also tap with the sort of the metal at the very end of your bow. People who have nice instruments really don't like to do this kind of thing. You know, all kinds of just strange sounds, which kind of, probably when I'm playing it alone, don't sound like much. But if you get, you know, 52 people doing that, it creates a kind of massive sound that's totally unique.

[F]

And that is what's going on in those creepy spider like moments. It's not any one thing. It's a bunch of string players divided into groups, each simultaneously executing a different sequence of plucking, tapping, bowing in the wrong place and striking the strings with the wrong side of the bow. Put it all together and the effect is to make your skin crawl. Pendratsky wasn't the only composer in the 50s and 60s experimenting with extended techniques and crafting eerie new soundscapes. But it's his music, more than anyone's, that would make the leap from the classical avant garde into the language of horror movies. But that wouldn't happen for another decade or so, not until the early 70s. And while it's always hard to definitively point to a single origin, there is at least a clear milestone movie, and that is the Exorcist.

[A]

How long are you Planning to stay in Reagan until she rots and lies stinking in the earth.

[F]

The director, William Friedkin, said that he wanted the music in the movie to feel just like a presence, like a cold hand on the back of your neck, which the Hollywood composers he was meeting with didn't seem to get.

[G]

They were telling him their ideas, and he said, no, I'm looking for something else.

[F]

Musicologist Frank Henschel, again, actually, what you

[G]

hear in the really uncanny moments is mostly Penderecky.

[F]

The music is rarely put up front for big scares, but rather it's hovering in the background of transitional scenes filled with mounting anxiety. Like after a physician tells the mother of Regan, the possessed girl, that they can find nothing physically wrong with her.

[A]

I think it's time we started looking for a psychiatrist.

[G]

There is a cut, and you just see her driving home. And you get a string quartet by Penderetsky. And this obviously depicts the uneasiness, the dread the mother feels and the experience of something unexplainable.

[F]

It never plays for very long in the Exorcist. It's not yet the in your face creepy crawlies. But the movie's soundtrack proved to be incredibly influential. Soon, other filmmakers began to draw direct inspiration from it, and none more so than Stanley Kubrick.

[A]

Mom, are you in there?

[F]

In the early parts of the Shining, Kubrick uses music not so differently from the Exorcist. Sparsely, quietly, to create a background atmosphere of looming dread. But then he goes to the opposite extreme entirely.

[G]

And as the movie goes on, the music becomes more and more intense. Kubrick uses faster and louder music.

[A]

I think we should discuss.

[D]

Danny,

[A]

I think we should discuss what should be done.

[G]

I mean, this movie has been called a horror opera. I think the last, like, 45 minutes, there's always music.

[F]

45 minutes of non stop Penderetsky. Kubrick uses six different works by him in the movie, chopped up and collaged into a dense, overlapping assault of frantic activity.

[G]

Kubrick even uses two pieces by Penderecky played at the same time. What he wanted was stress, tempo, fear, and no moment of quietness in between. And this is really almost exhausting.

[F]

Once these chilling soundscapes had been unleashed into the world of horror by the Exorcist and especially by the Shining. They were here to stay. And not just in the artsy films now, but in mainstream movies and schlocky ones too. You hear Penderetsky inspired music all over the Insidious franchise and in the Conjuring universe. And as for why, why it's so effective in horror, why it continues to make the hairs in the back of our necks stand up. It's because it sounds so strange. Yes, but strangeness alone doesn't make something horrific. A strange sound can be funny. Even Frank Henschel believes that what actually makes Pandoretsky's music so chilling is that what's lurking underneath the surface is less strange than we realize at first.

[G]

Because I think if you listen to it very closely and analyze it, you find these hidden connections. They're somehow inscribed some elements from the music which is so familiar to us.

[F]

Through all the dissonance, a trace of tonality remains. Out of the alien soundscapes come emotion, drama, expressiveness. And then there are the instruments. Not new electronic inventions, but violins, violas, cellos.

[G]

It's still the traditional romantic orchestra. But then they start and what comes out of it is not familiar at all. This mixture, this kind of very hidden, distorted, familiar elements in the music, they produce this uncanny feeling.

[F]

The critic Robin Wood defined the horror film with this normality is threatened by the monster. When we see a 12 year old girl's body taken over by a demon or ghosts lurking in the corridors of a luxury hotel, or when we hear unearthly shrieks and plunks emanating from a violin, it threatens to what we consider to be explainable.

[G]

It destroys the order with which we experience and understand reality. And if that happens, then this moment of disorientation results. And that leads to the uncanny.

[A]

When we come back. It's not uncanny, but it is annoying. Why, when you call up a company, are they always telling you to pay attention to their menu options?

[J]

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[K]

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[L]

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[A]

Our next question comes from the listener Nick Hollander in Atlanta, Georgia, who said something gnawing at him for years now.

[N]

Here is something I've been wondering about. Why is it that when you call customer service for virtually any company, the greeting always is please listen to our menu options? Because some of them may have changed. It's the same greeting for virtually every customer service line that you call.

[A]

Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.

[N]

It's just not possible that that would be true for every company that you've ever called. It's always in the same cadence with the same prompt.

[A]

Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. Please list the following as our menu options have changed, Please listen carefully to the following menu options as they have changed.

[N]

We know that's not true because I can call the company back in a week and their menu options won't have changed. It doesn't make any sense. So my question is, why do companies persist in doing that?

[A]

As soon as I heard Nick Hollander's question, I was as puzzled as he is. Please listen carefully. Menu options have changed is one of the inescapable phrases of modern life. Or at least being on hold along with this call may be recorded for quality assurance. One thing that's particularly bizarre about Please listen carefully as the menu options have recently changed is that you would really have to call a number a lot of times for it to matter that the menu options have changed.

[H]

Yeah, it's very presumptuous that I would have my pharmacy's menu items memorized.

[A]

Nick Green is a writer who's also irritated by this message, he kind of

[H]

thinks that we're fans of the call tree when we're really just trying to get help.

[A]

Also, like, even if you were a fan or used it all the time and you got it wrong, like, what would be the big deal?

[H]

Yeah, it's like they're treating it like it's map directions and if you get off the wrong exit, you know, you're not gonna be caught inside the phone for the rest of your life because you press the wrong button. You know, you can hang up and try again.

[A]

But the thing is also that I feel I so often end up in the wrong place because it's just like I just want to speak to someone and like, it's impossible. Yeah, but it's not because the options changed. You know, that's like the least of my problems.

[H]

You just want to speak to a person. And my, My guess is 90% of people do. What I do is just mash0 and

[A]

hope that you say operator.

[H]

Yeah, operator. Operator. Operator. Operator. Operator.

[A]

Like increasingly aggravated, horrific, mean voices.

[H]

It's like all I do, it turns us into monsters. But you know what, at least we're listening carefully.

[A]

Nick's smiling now, but in 2017, he'd heard the phrase please listen carefully because our menu options have recently changed one too many times. That's when he decided to get to the bottom of it. In an article for Slate.

[H]

I was trying to figure out two things. One would be how often do the menu items change?

[A]

Right? Like, have the menu options really changed?

[O]

Yeah.

[H]

Have the options changed? I mean, they seem to suggest they are changing all the time. So I wanted to know exactly how much they change. And I also wanted to know if that isn't the case, why is this message there?

[A]

So Nick started at the beginning. Before this phrase could exist, we needed automated phone messages. And Nick found that pre recorded messages were being tested as early as 1957 in hotel rooms.

[H]

Sheridan included that as part of their automated morning wake up calls.

[A]

When sleepy guests picked up the phone, they'd hear a recording of an operator telling them the time and weather and suggesting a breakfast menu in the hotel restaurant. But actually dialing a number and hearing menu options. That wouldn't be possible until the 1960s, when the old rotary phones, the kind with the big circular dial, began to be replaced with touch tone phones.

[O]

Hey, so what are you doing?

[A]

I'm making a phone call. Also a new touch tone found him. Jeremy Seymour. This is Touchstone Service, the newest, fastest way to make a phone call. The technological innovations continued into the 70s and the 80s, when you saw the explosion of things like 1-800-Numbers and automatic call distributors, the devices that can sort and direct calls to specific agents. By the 90s, dialing up a customer service number and being met by a pre recorded menu had become ubiquitous. And by 1999, you start to see complaints popping up in newspaper columns and New Yorker cartoons about one phrase in particular. Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. But even all the way back then, it wasn't clear if in fact menu options had changed. And nearly 30 years later, that's still what Nick wanted to know. So to figure it out, he started making a bunch of phone calls.

[H]

Well, first I contacted a local pharmacy in town that I knew had that message. And when I finally got to an operator, I asked them, hey, do you know when the last time your menu items have changed? And they said, I have no idea. And then about a week later, I decided to call again to see maybe the menu items did change.

[A]

They hadn't. So for his local pharmacy, at least, no changed menu. But Nick wanted to see if there was some more solid data out there on phone menu changes overall. He called up a company called Get Human, which monitors customer service lines and helps people navigate them. And the representative there told him there are certain kinds of businesses that are known to change their menu options fairly frequently.

[H]

The companies that do it the most often tend to be airlines and hotels due to weather cancellations and things like that. But they'll put that message right at the front. They won't say, oh, the menu items may have changed. They'll say, this is the big change that the menu is going through right now.

[A]

So they're like, it's a tornado hit one if you need to rebook your flight.

[H]

Yeah, exactly, yes. But again, they don't have to advise you that the menu items might change because they're telling you the important stuff right up front.

[A]

So why are companies that are not airlines or hotels companies whose menu options have no reason to be changing all the time, constantly telling us that they are? Nick's third step was to go to the source to call up the companies responsible for making the phone menus. Thank you for calling Holdcom. If you know your party's extension, please enter it now or. And so we decided to give them a ring too. If you need assistance.

[D]

Looking for a friend. This is Andy. Can I help you?

[A]

Yeah, hey, Andy, this is Willa Paskin from Slate.

[D]

Yes, Willa, how you doing?

[A]

Andy Benochet is the CEO of Holdcom.

[D]

We are a Very niche company where we produce professional recordings for businesses for their phone systems, whatever they need.

[A]

They're the people who actually record the voices you hear when you dial a company's customer service line.

[D]

I mean, we work with every brand possible, right? From large enterprise, Verizon Wireless and NHL Hockey and. But we also work with like mom and pops, you know, like auto mechanics and auto parts distributors and whatnot.

[A]

Andy told me the work often starts with a client coming to him with a pre written script that they think is all ready to go. And he can only shake his head

[D]

because we see, you know, we get the scripts from these folks and they're like, this is what we want to say. And then like, it's our job to kind of say, like, do you really want to say this? Like, this is not, you know, the best. You know, don't say, please continue to hold or we appreciate your patience. No, you're a robot. You don't appreciate your patience. They just want to get to a person, you know, so totally.

[A]

So we are specifically concerned with, I think you know this phrase.

[D]

Yes, I know the phrase. Please be advised your menu options have changed. We've recorded it a thousand times. I would say, you know, it's, it's a common phrase, it's kind of gotten baked in. But we, we advise against it. We think it's just kind of silly, wasted language. Like how many people memorize a phone tree that they're going to be like, wait, it's not press one for sales anymore. Why are you changing this? Like, that's just so ridiculous. Right? And we're like, well, we advise that you don't put that in there.

[A]

So customers literally ask you, like, we need to have menu options of change.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Why?

[D]

Well, I feel like it's a little bit of the copycat game. Like, oh, well, this is what all the big guys are doing. Maybe I should do this too, you

[A]

know, like, it's just a cliche. You should have.

[D]

Yeah, it's just become kind of like baked in type thing.

[A]

Why do you think this phrase started in the first place?

[D]

Yeah, I think it was probably an attempt to make people listen to the options more. They probably were getting feedback. Like, people don't even listen to the options. They just press zero to get to the operator. Right. Like, hey, listen, these have changed. You need to pay attention to what we're saying here.

[A]

And maybe they're right.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Because in my experience, I'm like, I don't want to listen. I literally don't want to listen. Like I just want to talk to someone.

[D]

Right.

[A]

But then why wouldn't they just say, like, please listen closely?

[D]

I don't know. Maybe. Maybe there was one person in the room was like, should we give a reason why they should listen closely? You know?

[A]

Right, because, like, please listen closely. So condescending. They're like, we can't tell them to listen closely.

[D]

Well, let's make it important. Let's say things have changed and they need to listen. So we started telling customers this is just not working. Like, this is old school, sort of like templated scripting, you know, like, just remove that.

[A]

So the guy who advises companies on this phrase says it's counterproductive and useless and there's no reason to use it. And Andy Benochet isn't the only expert who says so. When Nick Green was trying to figure out what was going on with this phrase, he spoke with a number of other phone menu companies in addition to Andy's. They all said, not only have the menu options likely not changed, the message itself serves no real purpose anymore, if it ever did. Nick thinks it's nothing more than a cliche that people feel they're supposed to include.

[H]

People will do things even when they're pointless or explicitly advised against doing them because they think it's the thing everyone else is doing. It's acting like an unconscious bison and a giant herd marching across the fruited plain and not knowing why they took a left at a certain place but are just doing it because they're following the well trod path of those who have gone before them.

[A]

I like that you just blazed your own metaphor instead of just like going with a lemming there or something.

[H]

Oh, yeah, maybe like lemmings. That's. Yeah, that's more known.

[A]

The only reason we may soon be free from these hackneyed phrases, including please listen closely, is that the phone tree making bison are all about to herd into AI, which will likely replace these stock sentences with a simple, how can I help you? Despite everything he now knows, Nick will still be all ears. Did it change how you feel about them, these messages?

[H]

No, I still. They're still annoying and I know they're pointless, but you know what? I'm. I'm. I'm kind of a rule follower. So I do find myself before mashing the zero button and screaming operator. I do give them the benefit of doubt, and I do listen carefully.

[A]

We'll be back with one more segment about a gesture. The versatile, the cutting, the ubiquitous, the wonderful eye roll.

[P]

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[K]

Did you know if we switch to Verizon, we can get 4 phones for $0, plus 4 lines for $25 a line? Call me back. Me again. That's just a hundred dollars a month for four lines on unlimited welcome. Plus four phones. No trade in needed. Call me. It's Mom. America's best network. Verizon. That's the one we're talking about. I'll send you text.

[L]

America's best network based on RootMetric's best overall mobile network performance. US second half 2025. Four new lines and a limited welcome and autopay. See verizon.com for details.

[A]

Our last question comes from our listener, Jade in Brooklyn, who's curious about one of my favorite gestures.

[Q]

I'm fascinated by the eye roll. I think this is a truly brilliant and unique gesture. The eye roll can be used in multitudes of ways as a sign of aggression or even as a weapon against aggression. And I think it's an excellent way to cut somebody down subtly while appearing to take the high road. I think it's also just a really funny gesture. I love it when Liz Lemon describes her eye roll as a masterpiece.

[A]

First wedding I ever went to, I was a flower girl for my Aunt Linda. When they said, you may now kiss the bride, I did my first ever eye roll. And today, I honor that little girl's eye roll with this masterpiece. I'm confident you're familiar with the eye roll not only from media, but from life. I think I eye roll at least once a day, though I can't say I'd ever actively wondered about it until Jade did. What is the eye roll?

[Q]

Where did it come from? Did somebody invent it? How did we all start knowing what it means? And when did it start meaning what it means today?

[A]

Before tracking down the answer to this question, I assumed eye rolling was ancient. Like, so ancient that cave kids rolled their eyes when cave parents asked them to clean their dens. But I was in for A surprise which came courtesy of an eye roll expert and practitioner.

[O]

Oh, yes, of course, everyone, don't they?

[A]

Rebecca Clift is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Essex. She became particularly interested in eye rolling while watching a church service on the BBC. It was for the reburial of the bones of King Richard III.

[F]

More than 500 years ago. King Richard III was buried by.

[A]

By Franciscan friars a few yards from here.

[O]

It's a very, very unpromising environment for an eye roll.

[A]

You know, a stodgy, proper, uptight royal ritual.

[O]

But there was someone in the front row who turned to the person next to him and gave a massive eye roll. And I thought, wow, that is something. And so I started collecting them.

[A]

When Rebecca says collecting them, she means finding as many examples of the eye roll in action as she possibly could. As I said, Rebecca's a linguist, but she focuses on a subset of the field, what is known academically as embodiment.

[O]

What we think of as body language.

[A]

Embodiments are all the gestures we use to communicate, everything from shrugging to slapping your hand over your mouth and you've said something you shouldn't and thousands more besides.

[O]

There's all sorts of things that are hugely expressive. And if we're face to face, we rely on seeing embodiments.

[A]

But because we have to see embodiments, they have to be studied differently than other areas of linguistics. A voice recording, a transcript, it can't capture a shrug or an eye roll. Only videos do that, which is why, after seeing that egregious eye roll in the middle of a funeral for a long dead king, Rebecca started collecting them.

[O]

Once you start looking for them, just keeping your eye out, they pop up everywhere.

[A]

Soon, Rebecca was pouring over historical footage for eye rolls, like in home movies, going back to the 1970s and looking for them also in online videos. There was Kate Middleton rolling her eyes at a charity event in New York. There was Angela Merkel eye rolling and Vladimir Putin at a G20 summit. And there was journalist Anderson Cooper doing one while interviewing Trump's adviser, Kellyanne Conway on cnn.

[L]

But what I don't understand in this

[F]

kind of a letter, why not ask

[A]

for a special prosecutor?

[O]

At this point, she gave a very, very irrelevant response.

[A]

You're conflating two things that don't belong together. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I was on your show often last fall saying we were going to win Michigan and how we were going to do it, so that was fun. But here's what happened today, and in

[O]

the middle Anderson Cooper does this massive eye roll and of course it went viral. You know, it was less than half a second, but some sharp eyed viewer found it and put it out there.

[A]

As Rebecca looked at eyerolls like this one, and hundreds more besides, leveled at home, on television, at funerals, in disgust, impatience, disdain, she began to see a pattern.

[O]

The eye roll turns out to be a protest, a sort of off the record protest to something that's just been said or done.

[A]

The eye roll is an expression of dissatisfaction, aggravation, contempt. But it's not just those things. It has more purpose than that. When you eye roll, you want those feelings to be known. Anderson Cooper wanted people to know, to see, see how he felt about Kellyanne Conway in that moment.

[O]

It's so effective and lethal in the sense we immediately know that here is protest, disapproval, whatever, and it's over in half a second.

[A]

It's so fleeting, it doesn't interrupt the flow of conversation.

[O]

Absolutely, yeah.

[A]

Like we're gonna play the Anderson Cooper clip and be like, there's nothing to hear.

[O]

Totally, totally. That's why, that's why it's, it's so beautifully collusive that it doesn't necessarily disrupt the ongoing action, but it is available. It may not, of course, be visible to the person who you're targeting, but it's available to be seen by others.

[A]

This meaning of the eye roll as a responsive protest, as something we do in response to the behavior of someone else for others to observe, it's so embedded in our understanding of the gesture that Rebecca assumed she'd be able to find accounts of it in historical writing. Because film and video only go back so far. When scholars of embodiment are looking into the history of a particular gesture, they scour older texts for corroborating descriptions.

[O]

The great novelists can catch these things and trap them.

[A]

But as Rebecca began looking at old writing, some of it ancient, she discovered something surprising. Eye rolling, the physical act of showing the whites of one's eyes, was mentioned quite often, but not at all as we know it.

[O]

So in the Aeneid, for example, when Dido prepares for her suicide, she rolls her eyes with livid spots. Distinguished was her face. Red were her rolling eyes and discomposed her pace.

[A]

Dido was not rolling her eyes because Aeneas did something annoying. She's rolling her eyes in sadness, in stress and fear. And then there's an example from Milton in which eye rolling seems to be a signifier of uncontrollable passion and lasciviousness.

[O]

In Paradise Lost, he Warns of tempting women who are made only for the taste of lustful appetence to troll the tongue and roll the eye. So aggression lusts, definitely.

[A]

Lust is not an aggravated form of protest. Neither is terror, though. That's exactly what the eye roll was used to express In a story published by Charles dickens in the 19th century.

[O]

It described a woman on her deathbed as rolling her eyes fearfully.

[A]

In other words, in the historical record, the eye roll was not a response to someone else's behavior. It was a manifestation of. Of one's own inner state, an expression

[O]

of high emotion and inner torment, an external expression of an inner feeling.

[A]

And the eye roll isn't just an expression of big, passionate feelings. In ancient and classical texts into the 20th century, it continues to not mean what we think it does. In silent movies, you can see Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin flutteringly rolling their eyes when a beautiful woman comes by. Or you could just crack open the 1963 Bedtime Classic where the Wild Things Are.

[O]

They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes. So it's a part of constellation of features really there showing aggression.

[A]

When do we start to see the first mentions of it where it seems like it might be familiar to us?

[O]

What we do know is that if you do a search on eye rolls on Google Books, there's a huge spike in the 1980s, which is when it appears to be first captured.

[A]

In fact, Rebecca found that in the 1980s, the disdainful eye roll was so new, newspapers had to explain what it meant to their readers.

[O]

The Washington Post reported at a breakfast meeting in 1987 that the former Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger was, quote, cheerfully rattling on and some of his listeners are rolling their eyes upward in an unmistakable oh brother expression. So the fact that that's explained suggests it wasn't an instantly familiar expression at the time. So, of course, these days we instantly recognize what it's doing.

[A]

But in 1987, like, you needed to explain it.

[O]

Yes, yes.

[A]

I mean, I guess I just want to underscore here, like, what you're saying is, basically, it seems as if the eye roll, like, was not a common feature of how humans communicate before the 1980s.

[O]

Yes. The fact that it's become associated so recently with responsive behavior rather than expressive behavior. It's extraordinary.

[A]

I asked Rebecca where she thought this relatively new responsive usage of the eye roll might have come from. She said that, as with slang, it's likely that it was circulating long before it was observed in something like a newspaper. And she pointed to an example in Zora Neale Hurston's classic 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which the eye roll seems to be getting closer to our contemporary understanding of it.

[O]

Joe rolled his cigar in his mouth and rolled his eyes away indifferently. Seeing this, it could well be sort of a slide towards the eye rollers protest.

[A]

Hurston was black and so were most of her characters. African Americans are famously generative when it comes to language, so why not with body language too? And there's another generative group of talkers that is also closely associated with the eye roll. Teenage girls, and maybe particularly the Valley Girl Barf out, Gag me with the spoon. Gross. I asked Rebecca what she made of the idea that the eye roll might have taken off with them.

[O]

I think the truth is we just don't know. But when I was looking at eye rolls, everyone produced them. What I've seen suggests it's not necessarily confined to girls and women, but women might fail themselves in context where they need to deploy it because it's an off the record way of doing a protest. I think the impression about teenage girls is because maybe parents register to them a lot because they're in the context where they're being asked to do the dishes and respond in a particular way.

[N]

Right?

[A]

Teenage girls, perhaps more often than the rest of us, find themselves in situations where they are required to go ahead and participate whether they want to or not. That participation may come in the form of a chore, but it could just be having to partake in an interaction, go to a gathering, listen to some mortifying adults. But teenagers do have a recourse and so do the rest of us. We all have one weapon at hand. We have the eye roll. It won't stop anything from happening, but at least it can communicate how we really feel. How could we ever have done without. Foreign. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. As ever, please consider signing up for Decoder Ring. Plus, you get to hear our Decoder Rings back episodes and skip all the ads and support the work that we do. It's no joke. It's really serious and it really helps. You can join by going to the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or visit slate.com decodaringplus we appreciate it. This episode was produced by Katie Shepard and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Decoder Ring is also produced by me and Max Friedman. Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Special thanks to Nicole Holliday and Lei Lehua Lanzilotti whose website Shaken Not Stuttered, is a fantastic resource about extended technique for strings. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to code, please email us@decoder ringlate.com you can also call us now at our new Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-7281. We love to hear from you guys and we'll see you in two weeks. Hannah, I just Venmoed you for dinner. Obsessed. I'm literally spending it right now on the lip gloss that's been sitting in my cart. What do you mean spending it right now? You instantly spend your balance with the Venmo debit card. Stop. Say more.

[D]

More.

[A]

Exactly.

[M]

The more you do with Venmo, the

[A]

more you get, like earning up to 5% cash. Back with Venmo Stash. Get the Venmo debit card or check out online. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 per month. See terms at Venmo Me Stash terms. Venmo checkout not available at all merchants. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A.

[K]

hey honey, it's Mom. Did you know if we switch to Verizon, we can get 4 phones for $0 plus 4 lines for $25 a line? Call me back me again. That's just a hundred dollars a month for four lines on unlimited welcome plus four phones. No trade in needed. Call me. It's Mom. America's best network. Verizon. That's the one we're talking about. I'll send you text.

[L]

America's best network based on RootMetric's best overall mobile network performance. US 2nd half 20254 new lines and a limited welcome and auto pay. See verizon.com for details.