Deja Vu All Over Again

Yesterday at 1:30 in the A.M I was rudely awakened.  The place was all lit up from headlights shining in through the windows and the dog was barking because there was someone beating on the front door.  I came downstairs and there was someone with a flashlight at the door.  It was a cop, the State Police were here.  I opened the door and he said they had gotten a 911 hangup from here.  I said that I hadn't called.  Then he wanted to make sure I was the only one here, so I let him in.  When he tried to use my phone to call the police post, there was a ton of static and it wouldn't work. 

The reason I say this is 'Deja Vu' all over again is that the same thing happened last year at our apartment in Hot-Lanta.  Same scenario, middle of the night, cops at the door saying there was a 911 hangup call.  Again phones wouldn't work, so we unplugged them.  An hour or two later, the cops were back saying the same thing and we told them it was impossible because the phones were unplugged.  Question, when the phone fucks up, why does it fuck up and call 911 in the middle of the night??  Why couldn't it do it in the afternoon?????

Anywho, that was about it for sleep as far as I was concerned for the rest of the night.  By the time the cops were convinced it was the phone itself that was screwed up and they left, I was so thoroughly awake I couldn't really sleep again.  I tossed and turned for several hours and when it was about 5 in the A.M. I got up and turned on the coffee pot.  When it got to be after 8, I called the phone company to report the malfuntion.  They at first said they had had problems and worked on the system the night before.  Then I was told the static may be because of the cordless phone.  I went and dug out from storage an old corded phone and when I plugged it in there was so much static that it wouldn't work.  Used my cell phone to call again and report that it wasn't the cordless phone.

That afternoon a couple of guys came to look for the problem with my phone.  One guy opened the service box on the pole and hooked up his test phone.  Then he looked at the line up on the poles and spotted a phone line hanging down from the next pole.  I told him that line used to go to the trailer we used to have on the place, but at one time there was a problem with the phone and the line was cut because no one was living in the trailer and that fixed the problem.  He then checked the wire with his test phone.  He said that the problem was probably that the rain had shorted out that wire.  He then asked if he could drive his bucket truck over by the pole and I said he could. (That there wasn't a septic tank or anything in that area.)  He used the cherry-picker to get up to where the wires were on the pole, disconnected the dangling wire and made sure the connections were good.

That seems to have fixed the problem.  Moral of the story, if you are ever in need of help and the phone doesn't work, you can MacGyver it by shorting out the wires to call 911!!!!!!!!!!!!