That "dial tone was real or a recording" thing is exactly what my buddy Dave went through. He swore the one behind the gas station on 5th was haunted because it kept ringing once and stopping. Turns out he'd been standing there for 20 minutes punching in his own number, and when it finally picked up he just heard his own voicemail greeting and hung up in a panic. He still brings it up at every cookout like it was some big mystery.

180 is being generous for a lot of those cheap drip machines. Most of them run closer to 165 to 170 at the brew basket, and it's worse right after the first cup because the heating element can't keep up. The part that gets people is that sour taste comes from under-extraction, so they keep grinding finer and finer trying to fix it when the real problem is the water never got hot enough to pull anything out. Worth knowing too that a thermometer in the basket only tells you the temp at the start, it drops fast as the water moves through the grounds.