I discovered that I accidentally left my phone slightly off the hook after terminating a call this afternoon. I have cable phone service.
Should I have heard the loud warning signal? I didn’t hear it, even after what has to have been hours.
What should have happened to incoming calls during this time? Would the cable service voice mail have kicked in? Would the call log list them? If I don’t have any voice mails and nothing on the call log, what are the chances I actually didn’t get any calls during that time period?
I don’t know what should happen with your cable telephone. There are no universal standards like the Bell System used to have. It would depend on your particular cable company’s implementation.
In the olden days of the Bell System, assuming the person on the other end of the line hung up, after a short time you would have heard a dial tone. If you did nothing in response, they would put a burst of tone on the line and disconnect. After a while they would put a “howler” on the line, which was the loudest noise that could be transmitted that would last for a short time. Then your line would go dead. Your line would be put on a slow scan, which means you would have to hang up for a while before you could use it again.
During this time, anyone who called you would get a busy signal. If you had voice mail service, they would be transferred to the voice mail system instead of getting the busy signal.
Unless your phone was on speaker, the maximum volume it can transmit is not all that loud. And the howler only lasts a short time. If you were at the other end of the house or in the bathroom, you would have missed it.
But, of course, you can try taking your phone off the hook and putting it down on the table for a while and then calling yourself from your cell phone or a neighbor’s phone and see what happens. And then let us know!
I do not have enough data to speculate about how many calls, if any, you may have missed that afternoon.