I wonder if the 411 and 911 calls were due to pulse dialing triggering on an intermittent connection. There are probably a few other folks of my age who remember discovering that you could dial a phone by tapping the hook at the right speed - after all, all that a rotary phone dial does is disconnect and reconnect the line at about 10Hz. If a wire was just loose enough that it was disconnecting intermittently, I would expect the pulse detector on the other end to detect a lot of 1s, a much smaller number of 4s, and very few 9s.