What's Your Hang-Up?

My Hang-Up is Hang-Ups! The kind that happen when you are in the middle of a task, run to pick up a ringing phone and the caller hangs up when you answer! This usually happens when I am in the middle of a task; like up on a ladder, finishing up another phone call and trying to hurry before voicemail kicks in, or at the furthest point from a working telephone.

I pick up, sweating from my sudden burst of actvity and breathlessly answer..... to which I am rewarded with silence followed by the click of a HANG-UP!

I then look at caller ID and see that the call was either from a toll-free number or unknown.
After several calls a day for about a week from the same number, I Googled it to see if I could learn who it was from. The only thing I found were several other people with the same complaint about this number and one person who called the number and got a fax machine.

What purpose does this serve? Other than pissing a bunch of people off, I don't get it!

Usually these kinds of calls come from phone banks that dial several numbers at the same time, talks to the first number that answers and hangs up on the rest. The tell tale signs of this type of caller are that it is from a toll-free or unknown source and there is a long pause between your answer and the caller's "Hello".

When I get a call like this, I like to wait through the pause and hang-up at the point the intruder says " Hello?. Not very mature or business-like but very satisfying!