Return of the dead ringer [after all...]

"Hello, can you hear me? Is there anyone there?" My desperate yells into the battered receiver of an old black telephone were met only with the thick silence of a pitch-black Irish night. The ornate contraption in my Dublin residence had always been dead: disconnected, numberless and cableless ?? or so I thought. But it suddenly gave out two piercing rings at midnight, the moment I turned 50