The database mix up sounds the most likely scenario to be honest.

I'd say you should call the local telco and explain it. If you get no where, phone or call into the local police station and explain what's going on.

I'm sure the police don't want to be wasting time calling to wrong addresses for no good reason either.

It's possible but highly unlikely that a line fault could be pulsing out 9 - 1 - 1

Although, I could see in Europe where the pan-european emergency number is 1 1 2 .. it is quite possible that a line with physical damage can pulse out 1, 1, 2 all by itself.

We'd a major problem in Ireland when 112 was first introduced. 121 was the short code used for voicemail access on a major cellphone network. A lot of customers were accidently dialling 1121 or 112 and getting thru to the emergency services. The problem was so bad Comreg, the equivlant of the FCC moved ALL public voicemail access to a standard short code: 171 and has banned numbers starting with 12 on cellphone networks.

Btw: 112 is a pan-european number that was introduced to work along side the existing services in each country. So the UK and Irish 999 services and other EU country's equivlants still exist.

(999 as far as I know was the world's first Emergency Service number, first appearing in the 1930s .. it was specifically selected to be difficult to accidently dial as it required 3 bursts of 9 pulses. In the 1930s telephone lines suffered from a lot of physical faults as they were often unsheathed... so you didn't really want a few crackles to cause the switch to put you through to the police at random...)

While pulse dialling may be dying out, pretty much all modern digital switches will still quite happily accept pulsed digits, so broken cables can still potentially dial things.

112 will usually work on a mobile phone with no account or SIM card inserted and will even override the key lock!

And interestingly, if you dial 112 on a GSM based mobile phone in the USA it will connect you to the emergency services too!


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 02-11-2005).]