What's going on with my phones?

Factual Questions
1

(Land line, in case you were wondering.)

Yesterday, my neighbor’s phone went dead on her in the middle of a conversation. None of her phone jacks would produce a dial tone. She came over to my place to call the person back, and make a few other quick local calls. Today, she came back to use the phone, this time to call her employer’s voice mail to make a change to the announcement. She says she has to do this every day, and mentioned that she had done it the day before too. Shortly after she left, my phones went out – no dial tone. I then called the phone company (Bellsouth/AT&T) and was told by the technician that there is a problem “at the location” that requires a technician. We’re in a small group of apartments (four units to a building); the unit over me has no phone service (mostly vacant), and the unit over my neighbor still has a dial tone.

Any guesses as to what’s going on? I find it strange that the phones died within minutes of her hanging up with her employer’s voice mail system.

2

Well, I dunno if this can happen on the modern phone system, but you used to be able to send some voltage through a phone line and keep that line open for quite some time before you could get a dialtone again. The phone lines would hold the charge for hours sometimes. There was a device made that you could attach to a modem and disable people’s phones just by dialing their number. Of course, this is highly illegal and I’m only posting this anecdotally . If something’s wrong with the voicemail system, it could be sending a surge through the phone line.

When you pick up the phone, blow into the mouthpiece and see if you can hear it through the earpiece. If not, it’s a completely different problem, like rats chewing through the wires or something.