Annoyed with Mysterious Callers?

There's one thing that just interrupts my day and night - phone calls. Not just any phone calls because I enjoy hearing from my friends whether they are far away or quite near. But it's those phone calls from some random toll free number.

You know that number. Your phone rings, you race to the phone even if you're in the shower or you're washing dishes or trying to put the kids to bed. You get to the phone and see it says "Toll Free" so you pick it up. You say 'hello' and hear nothing. You say 'hello' again. Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing! No person on the other end saying that they'd like to sell you some life insurance, no male voice asking if you'd like to upgrade your cable service, no female voice asking if you would like to donate fifty dollars to your local police station. It is just silence. Not even a computer voice saying 'all operators are currently on the other line, please wait' and then you hear cheesy elevator music for five minutes before the person comes on the line asking you for your credit card information to scam you. (I hate those phone calls too.)

But it is these type of phone calls that irritate our family each and every night. This 'toll free' person calls at least three times each evening with deafening silence before you hear a click and then that irritating beeping that we know and love - the other person hanging up!

But is there really another person on the other end? Is someone listening to you repeatedly say hello and snickering at you? Is it really a company that urgently wants to speak with you yet their computers have some sort of problem where they just dial your number over and over again and the company has no clue? Or is it just someone or some entity that desires to interrupt your evening meal each day with a random phone call to a random house of a random family trying to have one of those things called "family time" that society desperately seeks for each family to have?