Tuesday, December 1, 2009

More weirdness

Had two interactions with DeKalb County's finest last night, thanks to AT&T.  Our landline started acting up shortly after I got home from work, both phones connected to it kept making strange noises and the DSL became extremely erratic.  Disconnected everything, but it was late enough that I knew we weren't going to see a service technician until the following day regardless of when we called so otherwise didn't worry about it.

Around 1 a.m. someone knocking loudly on the front door woke me up.  Opened the window to look out before heading downstairs (yelling out a window being less energy intensive than putting on a robe and actually opening the door), and discovered two patrol cars sitting in the parking lot.  The officers said there'd been a 911 call made from our phone.  Bizarre. 

They looked a little skeptical when I said I had no clue why that would have happened because the S.O. and I had both been sound asleep for at least an hour, but eventually they believed me.  I connected one phone to demonstrate the loud staticky noises, and, after following SOP to ensure that there really was no one in distress (no hostages locked in a closet, no recently demised spouse sprawled in a pool of blood in the bedroom), they left.  Two hours later we got treated to a repeat performance:  same thing, report of a 911 call with the dispatcher reporting it was an open line (which implies someone desperately dialing and then keeling over before being able to say anything).  This time, because it was a repeat performance, they didn't bother coming in the house.

First thing this morning I did call AT&T; the technician was here before noon to check things out and apparently found a bad ground -- but he had no explanation for why our telephone would decide to call for help on its own.  Definitely very strange.

And I am really, really happy that we lead a remarkably boring life -- no hash pipes on the coffee table, no whips and chains in the bedroom.

4 comments:

  1. You must have one of those "smart phones" I hear so much about! Hope you get to sleep through the night tonight.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hum, that is a bit odd, usually a bad ground will just make the phone stop working or blow the fuse in the box on the outside of the house.

    In the good old days I could replace the fuse if it blew, these days there are two parts to the service box and you can't access the part they 'own', you have to have them service it, some kind of a union thing I think in order to protect their jobs.

    Anyway, I don't have much use for a phone anymore so I bought a cell phone and had my land line transferred to it and dropped my land line.

    It's pay per minute cell phone and I'll never use all the minutes before I have to buy more. I only turn it on once or twice a day to see if there are any voice mails.

    It only costs me $8.50 a month so it's almost a third of what I was paying for a land line I never used much anyway.

    And it's portable if I happen to want to use it, but I seldom do.

    no hash pipes on the coffee table,

    Sometimes it seems to me like everyone smokes that stuff but me.

    ReplyDelete

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