Here's a classic mystery. Yesterday morning, I noticed I had no dial
tone on my phone line. I checked all the phones, none were off hook,
so I decided to just wait awhile and see if it came back on, thinking
maybe the phone company was already working on it.

A couple hours later, I heard a couple of short very brief rings. I
checked and the dial tone was back. So, I figured problem solved.
Well, I head into the bathroom and about 5 mins later I have more cops
all over my house than Tony Soprano. They're ringing the bell, banging
on doors, by the time I get outside, they're rolling opent the garage
door.

Turns out, there was a 911 call showing up from my line. So, I figured
it might have been somehow generated while the phone line was being
restored. So, I check again, dial tone OK, phones all work.

Well, I go out for a couple hours, when I come home, I get another
visit from the cops. Seems they just got another 911 call, plus one
more while I was out. Later that evening, I got another call back from
the 911 center. At times I have a dial tone, at others just some
static. When the 911 call center gets the calls, all they hear is
static.

So, I have Verizon coming out today to look into this. They did some
sort of line diagnostic and believe it's a problem on their lines, not
inside my house. I've also now disconnected everything from the phone
jacks, except one std phone.

Anyone ever hear of this happening? I have a hard time figuring out
how an intermittent phone line can be managing to continue to dial 911.
I guess if it generates enough random pulses somehow it could do it,
but it seems hard to figure how it could do it 4 or 5 times in 8 hours.
For one thing, if you just start pumping random numbers into a line,
pretty quickly you get a "call cannot be completed msg" or similar, and
then you'd have to start another whole dial sequence, which takes time
and which would limit how many random calls an intermittent short could
make. Of course, I guess someone could be doing this intentionally,
but it seems most unlikely.