Who hasn’t made the same mistake, pocket-dialing someone you were just speaking to, or connecting to someone you’d rather not speak to? And who, having been pocket-dialed, has not eavesdropped for awhile as conversation unfolds on the other end? You can learn all sorts of interesting things this way — maybe even lose a friend or two.

Everybody knows this. And so Gardner listened. What he heard was a lot of banging and scratching. To him it sounded like a burglary in progress, and so he called 911. Three officers swooped down on his residence and found … nothing.

Gardner eventually called the dog back and found the device ringing in the garden. Maya, following ancient doggie tradition, had simply been burying a bone — or at least to a dog it must have sounded like bone.

What this story tells me is that dog owners need to enunciate their words more clearly when  training their pets.