After almost four months of the status being "Editor Assignment Pending", we have contacted the editorial office. The answer basically boiled down to "wait a bit more". So we did. After a few more of weeks of the status remaining unchanged and us not hearing from them, we finally sent an email requesting the manuscript to be removed from their system.
Then we waited for another week or two to see the paper actually removed from the system. Which did not happen: the manuscript remained in the the system with the same status.
Eventually, we decided to ignore them and submitted it to another journal.
Checked the system these days (about a month and a half later), because the paper is about to be accepted for publication in this new journal, and found that the manuscript is still in their system with the same "Editor Assignment Pending" status.
As a colleague of ours had an identical experience, we suspect that this is not an outlier.
Almost amusing.
