Delayed connection on land based phone answering?

Factual Questions
1

I have a delightfully concise greeting on my phone answering machine.

It’s “Hi. This is Darryl. Leave a message.”

None of this treacly bull shit like my brother: “Hello, this Brother. Your call is very important to me so leave me a message and I will call you back as soon as possible.”

In any case, about 4/5 of the calls to my land line end up with the caller going, “Hello, Hello…”, as though they are completely confused and didn’t hear a message. A friend of mine recently said that this very phenomena happened to him.

I’ve tested it using my cell phone and it seems to work fine.

My question is, are ratfuck telemarketing phone systems somehow delayed before connecting? Hmmm, I may have just answered my own question. Are automatic dial systems and telemarketers so fucked up that there is a delay between switching the call over to the person so that they don’t hear my answering machine? Is there some other phenomena going on here?

2

You got it right on the first guess.

3

This is one quick way of identifying telemarketing phone calls. If you answer and say “Hello” and get no response for a few seconds, just hang up. It’s likely a telemarketing auto-call system, that is now hunting for a free telemarketer to connect to you.

You may have some disorganized friends who dial your number, and then get busy doing something else before you answer. You might end up hanging up on them occasionally. But they’ll call back.

4

I have found the medical field is using it to notify patients of appoints and test results being in. Not all are sales people and politicians.

5

Thanks, it was one of those things that has been bugging me for ages. I guess the pent-up anger caused by clueless telemarketers was clouding my ability to analyze the situation. I’ll stick with my short message and let the cursed telemarketers hand in limbo.