At work (a retail operation) we get lots of junk phone calls. For example, some are people who just hang up without saying anything. But about once every day, we get a call where there’s a woman’s voice that just says “Good-bye”. At first I thought this was some nut, but it’s always the exact same thing; no variation as you would expect if it were a human. So it’s probably a computer doing the calling.
So my question is why would a computer do this? I’ve never gotten any calls like that at home, and I get lots of junk calls there. Any one else have a similar experience?
I think it’s a variant of the ‘silent call’ phenomenon. It’s a call centre where, for reasons of efficiency, a machine is dialling the numbers and passing them to human operators only when it detects a human being has picked up. The rate at which it makes calls needs to be tuned to the number of operators onhand, the average length of call, etc - if something goes a bit awry with that calculation, or just a few more people answer than expected, the machine is left with connections for which no operator is available - so it hangs up - sometimes silently, sometimes with a recorded message depending on implementation.
Just to add that in the UK, the silent call has been getting a lot of very negative press of late - my immediate guess was that it was a way of avoiding any follow up action by the regulator - “It’s not a silent call, guv!!”
Why they couldn’t just have a message saying “sorry to bother you, we have called you in error” or some such - probably because they’re paying per second…
Grim
"Good-bye" woman
Story of my life… 
Could be Anne Robinson. [sub]youaretheweakestlink[/sub]goodbye!
Get a phone that displays the caller’s number.
The idea that it may be a non-silent call has merit, but it doesn’t quite ring true (if you’ll pardon the pun). I mean, this happens virtually every day. I don’t get silent calls that often at home.
But perhaps it’s something similar (I just got this idea). When we answer the phone we don’t just say “hello”, we give a rather longer spiel: “Thank you for calling <yadda yadda yadda>” (this is a retail establishment, remember). So my idea is perhaps some machines are set to detect such longer talking and assume they’ve gotten an answering machine. So they hang up. This would also explain many of the hang up calls we get as well.
So are there any automated calling systems that do this kind of thing?
I’m guessing that you are on the receiving side of an out calling dial center. The computer calls numbers and screens out the busy tones, etc. It then passes along live connections to human operators. However, if there aren’t any humans available, it cuts off. They have the option of giving a recorded message.
TokyoPlayer, isn’t that what Mangetout basically said in the second post?
One thing is that we rarely get actual humans on the junk phone calls at work. At home I get them all the time, mostly trying to sell me a second mortgage on the house I don’t own. Never get those at work.
So I’d say that at least some of these calls are being aborted not by the lack of a free operator but because of some other kind of screening. Either it’s a human realizing that we aren’t their target market or automation cancelling because of too long of talking at our end or perhaps some other factor. Anyone know which it is?