How to deal with holding phone calls?

So obviously from time to time you have to call some service (especially in australia where so many digital systems seem to break often, so you have to call customer service)

But how to deal with waiting on the phone?The wait is sometimes up to 30 minutes, and it will play this horrendous music.If I turn the volume down, I will forget I was calling or won't notice quickly enough and the people will hang up before I can grab my phone.If I keep the volume up, it's so distracting that I can't do anything else and I'm basically waiting for 30 minutes staring at my phone.

Anyone else that experiences this? How to deal with it?