Sorry to veer a bit far from math, but some of you are phone-network folks, so maybe you can tell me: What do you call it when person A calls person B and after a few rings get shunted into voice-mail, without person B's phone ever ringing? (It's not a "dropped call"; that means something different.) My wife and I have this kind of experience many times, and have sometimes reproduced it with us and our two phones all in the same room or the same car. It's not a device-dependent effect; all cellphone-types seem to be equally susceptible. It's a network thing. It's the phone company saying "Hey, we could be honest and admit that the network is too busy for us to give you a connection right now, but then you'd probably consider switching to one of our competitors, so we'll just pretend that your party isn't answering." (Back in the days when AT&T had a monopoly, at least they were honest. As Lily Tomlin put it: "We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to.") Anyway, I'm considering switching carriers, except what if the competitors' networks are even worse? What I need are comparative statistics on calls that are never completed because of network issues. But before I can get those numbers, I'll need to know what they're called! Can anyone supply the relevant phone jargon? Thanks, Jim Propp ("Your call is important to us. That's why we want to make it last as long as possible.")