Greetings from the Twilight Zone

It all started yesterday morning when I picked up the phone to call Ben at work. Along with a faint dial tone, I could hear loud crackling noises on the line. I made the call anyway, hoping the crackling would go away, but instead I got an additional treat—a woman speaking Spanish between rings. She was loud enough that I said, “Hello?” and assumed she would say something back, but she just kept talking.

After a quick chat with the Spanish-speaker, the crackler, and Ben, I hung up the phone and picked it up again. This time, instead of a crackling dial tone, all I heard was a crackle. Thinking it must be a problem with the cordless phone, I picked up the corded phone in our office. Still no dial tone. In fact, now all of the phones were saying, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed…please hang up and try your call again,” no matter how many times I hung up in between.

Each time I picked up the phone after that I got a random busy signal, a recording, or silence. Ben did some investigative work when he got home and still couldn’t figure out what the problem was. We decided we would call the phone company in the morning.

Then, at 10:00 last night, the police came pounding on our front door. They said they had received a 9-1-1 hang-up call from our house, and that nobody answered when they tried to call back.

WHAT?!!

We’ve already established that the phone is freaky, but freaky enough to call 9-1-1 on its own? We apologized to the cops and told them we would call the phone company immediately. After setting up an appointment for someone to come check out our lines in the morning, we picked up the phone one last time and heard this: “Thank you for calling KWED…”