(FORTUNE Magazine) – ''Please hold.'' Such are the words that every caller dreads. But many companies with 800 numbers are trying to make holding time more pleasant in order to reduce the ''abandonment rate,'' or the number of callers who hang up. Perhaps nobody has gone to more elaborate lengths to do this than WordPerfect in Orem, Utah. Callers to the software maker get to listen to a live ''hold jockey.'' One is Barbara Lee, 33. She entertains them with pop music interspersed with rush hour-style traffic reports, announcing ''a three-call backup for Windows installation support,'' say, or ''a two-minute delay for laser printers.'' Lee gets the information from a bank of 16 computer monitors that tell her how many calls are waiting on each of the more than 50 customer service numbers that WordPerfect uses. A former radio newscaster, Lee helped develop this way of handling callers when she was in WordPerfect's marketing department. She shares duties with Dave Webb, 29. While automated phone-answering programs can perform a similar function, even computer nerds, it seems, respond to the warmth of a live human voice. Lee has actually received marriage proposals from more than one smitten caller. (Sorry, guys. She's taken.) Even more flattering, she claims, competitors such as Microsoft and Lotus have installed copycat ''hold jockeys'' since she started in 1990.