[Asterisk-Users] Using Asterisk to Find a Live Person

[Aaron Glenn]

That's the least ambiguous subject I could muster. I'm relatively new
to Asterisk and while I'm certain there is a way to do this, I'm
unsure how. My question is this: How do I take an incoming call, put
the person on hold, and in the background (i.e. while they are on
hold) begin  trying other phone numbers until someone answers?

Example: 
Jane calls the Network Operations line. Jane gets a greeting "Thank
you for calling Network Operations, please hold for the next available
datacenter monkey" and while Jane enjoys lovely elevator music,
Asterisk begins dialing datacenter monkey phone numbers. First it
tries Jack for 20 seconds on his cell phone, but Jack doesn't pick up;
then it tries Josh for 15 seconds on his home line but Josh doesn't
pick up either. Finally it tries Aaron who dutifully picks up his
cellphone. Asterisk then connects Aaron and Jane together, happily
ever after.

I apologize if this has been covered before but none of the search
terms I tried provided much help. I'm going to go out on a limb and
say all of this can be done in extensions.conf; but again the putting
an incoming line on hold and then doing something in the background,
plus connecting two lines together, is a bit above my current Asterisk
abilities.

Thank you very much for any insight you can provide.

Regards,
aaron.glenn