Drama-Loving Telecom

Once a year, for a very short moment, our phone is possessed.  Once a year, in the wee dark hours of a late winter morning, a bored portion of our telecommunications system decides that a little more drama is necessary in our lives and promptly places a call to 911.  Lacking a voice, the system cannot speak to the local 911 dispatcher, so it crackles static at her and hangs-up.  Then, just for good measure it knocks out our whole phone system for a few minutes so the dispatcher cannot reach us when she tries to verify the call.  Being the conscientious first responder that she is, she dispatches the local police to our supposed aid.  At 2:00 a.m. the police duly arrive at our door to save us from whatever fate our telecom system has imagined for itself.

This year's incident didn't include as much drama as last year's.  LH was still up and successfully alleviated the policemen's concerns for our family's well-being.  I assume that he because looked so bewildered by their presence and was so cooperative that they didn't feel the need to awaken all of us to check on our safety.  We are grateful.  Well, I am, at least.  I have a vague memory of LH turning on the light to check on me, and of deep voices wafting upstairs from the hallway, and of feeling like I should go see what was up.  But, I was too exhausted to get my body mobile.

LAST year, the arriving patrol car's flashing lights woke up then 6 year-old Urchin-boy, who promptly opened his window to talk to the cool policemen.  They asked him to let them in, which he did without hesitation, neglecting to wake his parents first.  He bounded down the stairs, flung open the front door, let the policement in and set off our security alarm in the process.  The screech of the alarm woke the rest of the family, and we tripped all over ourselves in our haste to get downstairs and shut off the alarm before it called the police.  (I don't know why we have the alarm, given that we're more likely to think that our children set it off than an intruder.)  I'm SO thankful that I took half a second to grab my robe.  It was VERY disconcerting to find my son and two policemen standing in our front hall.  It would have been far worse to have greeted them in my underwear.  They told us of the 911 call (like they did this year) and we checked the redial feature of every phone in the house.  Nothing.  No one in the house had placed that call.  Same thing this year. 

Now, our local police are very understanding, but sooner or later they're going to tire of these annual get-togethers; plus, I have a moral objection to wasting their time.  So, I spent today trying to make both Comcast and our alarm company find the reason for these calls.  I have a page-full of notes from calls and tech visits, and nothing to show for it.  They preferred to blame each other.  

Tomorrow, I'll chase down the dispatch center's director and get a record of the call.  I would hope that both of those companies will take a bit more notice after that.  One of the Comcast reps actually had the gall to suggest that the call occurred because one of our phones is "getting old" and (when I skeptically suggested that it would be more likely for a dying phone to simply stop working than to place random emergency calls) she actually said "you know, phones these days are made differently than the old phones, it could happen." 

Right.