I answered. Silence. After several seconds, I said "howdy," again. Another, shorter, silence (About 5 seconds, the first time, and 3 seconds the second, for somewhere between 7 and 9 total.) followed by a sound. Maybe a woman's voice saying a word like "at." Or, just a buzz on the same pitch as a woman's voice. Followed by a click..... and it was disconnected.
That's it. What comes next is mere opinion. Pure conjecture. People often ask questions, so I'll try to generate an explanation. I only know what I know and that's not a lot, but I like learning new things and I'm open to new ideas, so I ask questions and try to answer a few, when an idea comes to mind. If I'm wrong -- if I put one, single, tiny wrong word in this -- I apologize. Please forgive me. Sometimes our best lessons are learned from our worst mistakes.
I've answered enough phone calls over enough decades and studied enough about these kinds of things and read enough posts on this site to have some -- quite possibly wrong -- idea of what happened.
Hopefully, those are enough disclaimers, clearly identifying the following as an opinion, based on a combination of fact and conjecture. Here 'tis, worthless as it may be, based on generally known fact:
Many calling operations -- telemarketers, scammers, survey takers, politicians -- use equipment which does the dialing for them. You answer, THEN the dialing equipment summons a live individual to talk to you. The law allows this, but it requires them to put that live agent on the line within mere seconds (hence, my count.)
I'm going to hazard a guess that something malfunctioned. Maybe it was a woman's voice I heard. Maybe she pressed the button to answer after she started saying "Did you know that," and inadvertently pressed it again before she finished saying "that" and so all I heard was "aaat."
Or, it could be that there's a problem in their dialer and it dumped, instead of transferring, the call and it generated the sound.
Or, I'm completely wrong. Maybe any one of a million other possibilities caused this strange curiosity to occur.
It's happened to me often enough that I'm pretty sure others have the experience of having a live person put them on hold, or try to transfer them directly to another department, and instead the connection is terminated. Some companies even ask, "In case we are disconnected, what is a good number for me to call you back on?" (I always tell them "None. There is no number it is ever okay for you to call me on, for any reason, ever. Put me on your internal do not call list. If we are disconnected, I will call you back.") So, the possibility of some human or technological error causing this call to terminate is not some wild thing I made up. I was eating a sandwich when it happened. Did the tomato in it cause this disconnect? I'm pretty sure it didn't.
I've been called a troll, and maybe I am one. I don't think this post qualifies as, “Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent by-stander, because it's the internet and, hey, you can.” – UrbanDictionary.com