|
This reminds me of a weird calling issue I came across, but mine is obviously unrelated. I needed to make calls from America to Australia (inquiring about apartments from the Australian equivalent of Craiglist), so I was using a calling card that I typically use for calls around North America. I make the first call to Australia, and the apartment was suppose to be owned by a woman looking for a roommate. Anyway, a man picks up the line and says hello. I can hear a woman in the background talking, and dogs barking. I ask for the woman by name, and the man says to hold on one second. Then he starts arguing with the woman for a minute, returns to the line and asks if I'm still there, and then says to hold one moment, and now you hear the dogs barking louder, and it sounds like he's taking them outside because the woman is complaining. There's also a TV or radio in the background. I think he returns again a couple of minutes later, apologizes and asks me to wait longer, but I can't be certain. I remember after about 5 or 10 minutes I decided to hang up because I'm calling long distance, the man sounded rude, and it didn't seem like a place I'd like to live any way. Now, I call a few other places throughout the week, and get a few people on the line, and others with weird connection errors saying the numbers can't be reached. Then, I'm making a call to a number in a completely different city a few thousand kilometers away, and the same man from before answers. He asks me to hold one second, and I don't recognize the voice at first. Suddenly, I hear the TV, radio and the dogs barking again, and get this weird sense of deja vu as things start to repeat. I hang up. I now realize it's a recording, and I never talked to a real person the first time around. But... I'm calling a completely unrelated number, so how did I get this message again? I call the number back, and now it goes through to the actual person I was trying to reach. This would continue to happen on future calls, but by then I knew the routine and would hang up and redial. Any idea what was happening here? I used these calling cards all the time and never had an issue. Somehow my calls were getting sent to this recorded message when calling Australia, regardless of the number I was dialing. The recording was trying to keep me on the line for an extended period of time. My only conclusion is that these cards are getting rerouted through another country or less than trustworthy business. They then forward a certain percentage of calls to this message in order to get longer call times, and higher profits. |