Junk Phone Calls

Or, How Working For The Enemy Saved My Sanity

Recently, I was under a telemarketing siege of annoying proportions. Most days I received eight to twelve calls and in almost every case the caller would hang up. I can think of only two times within a week period where I actually got to talk to a live person, and let me tell you they probably got a little more of my wrath than they deserved… even for a telemarketer.

Each of these calls had the trademark of being basically anonymous on the caller ID. The calls always showed as "OUT OF AREA" with no phone number information. It's very frustrating to be getting twelve calls a day and not even getting to talk to them and tell them to stop calling. I tried everything with these people: picking up after one ring, picking up after two rings, picking up after three rings, saying "hello", saying my name, saying "hoy hoy", saying "don't hang up you son of a... " You get the picture. Every time, there would be a short pause, a click, and then nothing but the low crackling noise of a dead phone line. (Yes, I know you can purchase junkbuster devices and the like that will "supposedly" nip these calls in the bud but I'm not sure how well they really work. In addition, I feel weird having to pay money for something to keep sales people from bothering me.)

It was rapidly reaching the point where I was ready to either go live with the Amish or move to some jungle somewhere and eat bugs. Basically, anywhere that was guaranteed not to see a telephone within my lifetime. But, then I hatched a plan...

Some history: I'm almost ashamed to admit this but back in the early 1990s I used to work for a software development company that wrote systems for call centers. It's these call centers (or telemarketing companies) that are the ones making these calls. We wrote scripting systems that prompted the telemarketers with what to say, etc. and we also wrote a simple auto-dialer.

An auto-dialer is essentially a piece of software for calling all of the numbers on a phone list. Each call is placed and then if a person answers, the call is connected to an agent. (Agent being the fancy word for telemarketer.) There are various flavors of auto-dialer; predictive, progressive, etc.. In all cases, the software will keep track of the numbers that it has already dialed and the disposition of the call. (It's a big no-no for a company to call you twice for the same reason.) Bad numbers are removed and busy numbers are marked as such. All of these allow the dialer to call as many good numbers as possible.

In addition, many dialers go a step further. Recognizing that some percentage of the calls they make will not go through, they make extra calls. If there are no agents available when a call is completed then the call is dropped. (Dropped being a fancy word for pissing someone off anonymously.) The telemarketing company doesn't really care about this. After all, it's there job to make as many completed calls as possible so if some number of people get dropped it isn't really their concern.

The interesting thing is that, often, dropped calls fall into a similar status as busy calls. The dialer likes these numbers because it knows someone is home. It will therefore try to get back to that number sooner rather than later. So, with a little inside information about auto-dialers, I hypothesized some theories.

Theory 1: the dialer was mistaking my line noise and voice for an answering machine. This is why I tried answering the phone in so many different ways. One problem with this theory is that at least some companies will leave a message rather than dropping the call. Another problem is that they likely wouldn't call back at the same times every day or even on the same day.

Theory 2: I'm really unlucky and it's really hundreds of different call centers trying to call me. For this to be plausible, it has to be combined with Theory 1. Otherwise, I'm really extremely unlucky because these hundreds of call centers are also dropping me.

Theory 3: A handful of call centers have my number in their list and have their drop thresholds set WAY too high. This is the most plausible theory because it means that my chances of getting dropped are very high. It also means my chances of getting re-called are very high.

It was actually Theory 1 and exploring different ways to answer the phone that was the spark for my plan. I was trying to remember what our software did to detect answering machines when the light bulb came on...

See, to detect bad numbers, auto-dialers listen for the SIT tones. (SIT = special information tones, so yes, SIT tones is redundant like ATM machine.) These tones are kind of nifty because the dialing hardware itself can usually detect them and the dialing software just gets the status. The hardware algorithms for detection are usually pretty robust so that they work even with some amount of noise and such.

Well, back when I did this call-center work I gained an interesting talent. After many months of 18 hour day software development and testing of these systems, several of the developers (including myself) got pretty good at whistling SIT tones. This allowed us to do bad-call testing in a closed phone system. Not a particularly interesting talent, but one I could definitely put to use.

When the next "OUT OF AREA" call came through, I was actually excited. I picked up the phone and whistled those three tones we all know and love. There was no pause... in fact it had dropped me before the third note! Within two hours I had received three more calls. I handled each of them the same I way I handled the first. In each case, I was dropped before the third note.

Did it really work? It's only been a day, so only time will tell. I will say that I have not had one of these calls in well over 24 hours, so I'm very optimistic. The total number of calls for which I did this was five. So, I was either besieged by five different call-centers, or I'm not as good at whistling SIT tones as I thought and they were just calling me back.

Anyway, even one day without these calls is a welcome change! Plus, it makes for an interesting story...