I rarely share stories where there is only one source and the source has been kept anonymous, but I’m making an exception for this one for two reasons. First, because the audio of the “hold music” is available, I’m reasonably convinced that this actually happened. Second, the reason the Register kept this anonymous makes a ton of sense to me: “We’re keeping [the source] anonymous, lest they be flooded with calls from people eager to experience it first-hand.”

(Fair enough: I’d have absolutely hunted down that number and called it.) — Dan

A Spiteful (But Funny) Way to Deal With Telemarketers

We’ve all been there: the phone rings, the number on the caller-ID is one we’re unfamiliar but we answer anyway, just in case. Unfortunately, the results are typically not a pleasant surprise. At best, it’s a wrong number; at worst, it’s an automated message or someone trying to sell you something you probably don’t need. Either way, it’s annoying, and typically ends up with you hanging up the phone without a second thought.

That’s a minor annoyance for many of us, but thankfully, it’s a rare one. But for those in certain jobs, it can be very frustrating. In the world of business-to-business sales, “cold calling” — that is, making an unsolicited phone call to a potential new customer — is apparently a tried-and-true method of bringing in new business. However, it’s also a method that ends up with a lot of failures along the way. If you’re an outbound salesperson cold calling potential prospects, it makes sense to call as many people as you can in hopes of finding a person who can actually say “yes” (or more accurately, “I’d like to learn more”). If you call fifty people and 49 hang up on you, that’s fine -- you’ve found one potential customer that day. And before you make that call, it’s very hard to tell if the person on the other side has the power to say yes on behalf of their employer. As a result, cold callers make a lot of calls to people who simply aren’t empowered to buy anything — and as a corollary, a lot of people who aren’t empowered to buy anything get a lot of sales calls.

And there’s not much they can do about it. Except, maybe, get even.

In 2016, the IT department at an unnamed San Francisco-area company was struggling with a lot of unsolicited sales calls — the head of a support department, who wasn’t in charge of making purchasing decisions, complained that he received, on average, 20 such calls a day. The department routed all their calls through a receptionist to help filter out many of the calls, but some got through. As the department head told the Register, “in the middle of a team meeting, an emergency call came through the IT support hotline, interrupting our meeting. One of our help desk guys picks up and it's a sales guy claiming that he had just been chatting with me, the IT Director, and wanted to be transferred through so he could ‘finish the conversation.’” The help desk employee suggested sending the caller to voicemail, but the director, jokingly, had a better idea: “I'd prefer that you transfer them straight to hell instead.”

And that sparked an idea: Extension 666, the phone line with the hold music that only the Devil could appreciate.

The idea was simple: if a salesperson made a call to the IT help desk, the help desk employee would (politely, I’d hope, as it makes it funnier) thank them for their call and then transfer the caller to that extension. Once there, the caller would be subjected to one of the most horrendous audio experiences you can imagine. You can listen to it below, but you might want to turn your speakers way, way down first -- it’s loud (at times) and jarring.

OK?

Click here to give it a listen.

Awful, right? And to make matters worse, there’s no way out. While the message claims to allow callers to hit a certain number on their keypad to reach another extension, that’s a lie. Per the Register article, “Once in the queue, any button you press once in this queue restarts the recording.” The only way out is to hang up, but that’s not immediately obvious. The IT lead also noted that he was considering writing a small piece of code to measure who spent the most time in cold caller hell -- that is, which callers lasted the longest before hanging up — but it’s unclear if that ever came to pass.

Regardless, the IT team knew that Extension 666 worked: the day after they launched it, the extension was the most-used one in the office.

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📞 More About Unwanted (?) Phone Calls ☎

Today’s Bonus fact: Imagine you get a phone call from an unknown number, pick up, say hello, and wait three seconds -- and hear nothing. What are you going to do? You are almost certainly going to hang up, right? That habit turned out to be a problem for a Canadian woman named Helene Hadfield. She was going through that process regularly a few years back, but it wasn’t a prank call or a salesperson on the other line — it was her husband. Chris Hadfield is an astronaut who, at the time, was aboard the International Space Station. As he explained in this video, the process of making a phone call from orbit to someone back on Earth is cumbersome and, more importantly, limited by the speed of light. The sounds you make on the ISS can take a few seconds to reach the person you’re trying to speak with — and his wife, seeing a call from an unknown number and then experiencing a short delay after connecting -- kept assuming that his calls were pranks or misdials. NASA fixed the problem by mapping the numbers Chris would be calling from so that they appeared on Helene’s (and presumably others’) caller ID as “Space.”

From the Archives: A Profitable Way to Stop Telemarketers: Reverse the charges!

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And thanks! — Dan