Dear Valued Customer by Rick Broadhead

Author:Rick Broadhead [Broadhead, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4494-1312-5
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

We’ve all heard stories about toddlers and pets accidentally calling 911, but the following story is the only one ever recorded where a 911 call came from a tomato.

RIPE FOR TROUBLE

Blacksburg, Virginia, November 1990

One day in November 1990, a 911 dispatcher in Virginia began receiving repeated calls from a home just north of the town of Blacksburg, about 210 miles from the state capital of Richmond. But each time the dispatcher answered the call, there was no one on the line. The mystery deepened when the dispatcher tried to call the home back and got a busy signal. When she hung up, another call came in from the same home, and then another. The puzzled dispatcher grew increasingly alarmed and finally notified the police.

The police tracked down Linda, one of the homeowners, who was visiting her mother at the time. Linda told the police her home should be empty. “I told them I’d locked my house and there shouldn’t be anyone in there,” she said in an interview with the Roanoke Times. The police thought that Linda’s home might have been vandalized, so they asked her to come home immediately and meet them there.

When Linda arrived, she was told to wait outside as sheriff’s deputies rushed into the home with their guns blazing. They searched the house and found no signs of a break-in. Linda’s brother, who had also come to the scene, starting doing some detective work of his own. To everyone’s surprise, he discovered that an overripe tomato had been making the frantic calls for help.

The bright and juicy tomato had been sitting in a wire basket above Linda’s telephone, leaking juice into her answering machine. Evidently, tomato juice had seeped into the telephone’s dialing system and triggered the calls to 911. The police were stumped. “We’re not sure how [this happened],” said Chief Deputy Milton Graham of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office. “Maybe they had speed-dialing and it shorted out,” he said.

Linda was also perplexed by the bizarre turn of events. “It was all very strange,” she told the Roanoke Times. “The police said it was like The Twilight Zone. There were several things they did not understand.”

For example, they still can’t figure out how the answering machine managed to make so many phone calls. “I didn’t know the answering machine could even dial out,” Linda said. “It’s just supposed to take messages.”

Sources: Associated Press, Roanoke Times

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.