Several folks have written to explain to me about the mysterious phone calls I mentioned here. This message from Jeff Beton sounds like the correct answer…
What you're experiencing reminds me of a job I had a few years ago. I worked in a call center briefly where we would call people at random around the country and ask them questions which were calculated to identify what kinds of goods or services they might be apt to buy. Then our company would sell those leads to other companies. So we'd find out you weren't happy with your car insurance and then we'd sell your number to a company that would call you and try to sell you car insurance.
The problem with working on something like this is that a lot of phones weren't answered by human beings so if we just called different numbers, we'd be spending a lot of time listening to phones ring or getting voice mail and it would waste our time. So someone came up with a device that wastes your time instead. It was programmed with a list of numbers to call. There were millions of them. It would call ten or twelve of the numbers at the same time and search for live people for me to talk to. When it found one, it would route that call to me and I would talk to that person and try to get them to take our survey. If other calls in that batch were answered by humans, it would simply hang up on them and note that number as a likely prospect to call back later.
What you're experiencing is probably a company that's making 20 robo-calls at once. The first call that connects to a live human is routed to the survey taker. The rest get hang-ups. You're getting the hang-ups.
That sounds like it, especially my brief connect yesterday to someone who sounded unprepared to be talking to me. Okay: Unless someone comes up with a better explanation, I'm buying this one. Thanks to Jeff and all the folks who sent in answers, many of which were quite similar.