Mysterious “Ghost Calls” Kept Dropping—Then a Helpdesk Employee Discovered What Was Causing Them
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Workplace tech issues can have surprising causes.
In this story, an employee was working on a helpdesk and noticed that calls kept dropping mysteriously.
Agents would answer, only for the call to disconnect seconds later, again and again.
The strange pattern went on for quite awhile until they finally discovered what was really happening.
Can you guess what’s causing these mysterious phone calls? Check out the full details below.
The ghost in the phone system
This story was from working on a helpdesk about 15 years ago.
For a while, we had this strange issue.
Sometimes. an agent would answer a call from the queue.
Just after they finished their greeting, the call would drop.
This employee noticed that this incident kept happening.
Then another call would come in from the queue.
When the agent answered, the exact same thing happened.
It could be the same or a different agent.
This would usually happen for about 30 minutes. Then, it would stop.
This would mess up their call metrics and stats.
Take note, our phones would not pass caller ID when a call came in.
The caller ID was always something like IT helpdesk call queue. We could not see who was calling.
Not only was this annoying, it messed up our stats. It particularly affected the calls received to tickets logged metric.
That is a stupid metric. It did make our calls answered higher and the average call handling time go down.
They decided to investigate what’s happening.
Although it was fairly infrequent, we investigated it.
We had the telephony provider look into it. What they found was interesting.
When this happened, one particular desk phone was making many back-to-back calls to the helpdesk queue.
Usually, there were around 30 to 50 calls. These calls were answered. The call handling time was usually only around 3 to 5 seconds.
Occasionally, just the last call would have a handling time of several minutes.
They found out that one particular caller wanted to speak to one person only.
What was happening became clear.
The person using this desk phone only wanted to speak to one person. They refused to speak to anyone else. So they would call and wait on hold if necessary.
They would wait for the call to be answered. If it was not the person they wanted, they would hang up immediately. They would not say anything. Then, they would call again and repeat this until it was answered by the person they wanted.
Lol. That’s next-level persistence for that caller. Imagine calling that many times just for one person.
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What they might have thought was harmless was actually annoying and damaging to the company’s call metrics.
Oh well, some people can be surprisingly inconsiderate.
Let’s see how others reacted to this story on Reddit.
This user shares their personal thoughts.
A former phone support officer speaks up.
Sheesh! Here’s another serious issue.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a teenager who wants to work, but his mom thinks working past 8pm is too late for high school.
This person wants some updates.
Finally, another person chimes in.
Persistence is admirable… until it becomes a nuisance.
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