That reminds me of the other time I’ve called 911, thankfully with a better outcome than my mother’s death. My then-girlfriend (now my wife) was having a severe sciatica attack, and couldn’t get out of bed without horrible pain.
Once, a car hit the utility pole across the street from my house at a very high speed. The car was totaled but the driver was OK, if very drunk.
We don’t have 911 in my country, but I have called our emergency line 10111.
I was riding my bike home from work (a restaurant) at about midnight, a good night, so I was carrying quite a lot of cash (think, 10% of my rent). On my way I came across this guy, in a yellow VW new Beatle, parked in an intersection. He was visibly angry and disturbed. I locked my bike to a lamppost and walked up to him.
I said, “can I help” and he went into full fighting defence mode..
I talked him down. Turns out that he wound down his window to “chat” with a young lady in a known prostitution strip, and she stole his car keys. I helped push his car as far off the street as I could, then left to find a payphone (the olden days before cellphones) and dialed 10111.
I saw the cops as I was leaving the phone, flagged them down, and explained the situation in detail.
Following up the next day - because I was curious - the arrival of cops on the scene meant the miraculous recovery of the keys, from a “by-stander”, meant he got home.
Well, I am not sure if he “got home”, anyone dumb enough to open a window to a street prostitute is not really safe to drive.
I’m surprised they took your word for it. You could have been an intruder who took the phone from the person who dialed.
Once, when i fumbled with my bedside phone in the middle of the night, i must have accidentally called 911. The police called back, and i told them what happened, and they said they had to come over anyway. So i went downstairs and met them at my front door a few minutes later, in my nightgown, and repeated the same story. They thanked me and drove away.
The two most memorable times i called were
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when my husband was driving down an interstate and a large toy house fell off a truck and blocked a lane. (The kind of toy house a child or two could fit inside.)
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i was on an island on lake Winnipesaukee, and saw a house across the lake go up in flames. I spent a while on the phone, looking at the burning house and a map of the lake, trying to tell the dispatched exactly where it was. After a few minutes, she told me they’d had some other reports and were able to triangulate the location from them, and she thanked me and hung up. By then, there was enough smoke that the responders could probably travel towards the plume.
I called 911 during hurricane Sally, The wife, me and the cat were floating on our mattress in two feet of water:
“911 what is your address?”
“I thought you had that automatically”
“I do sir but I need to confirm it to avoid fraud”
“OK (gave address) we’re in a couple of feet of water and need assistance”
“I’m sorry to hear that sir but we cannot respond to your area because there is a tree blocking the road”
“The water is still rising, how long do you think it will take?”
“Probably late this afternoon sir”
“uh…er…um…didn’t anyone think of that - this is hurricane country”
“Yes sir, but you will have to use local resources" click
We floated on the mattress and I called 911 a couple of times with the same result. Then the front door burst open and a couple of locals splashed in. They were two survivalists with a boat. They scooped up the wife and the cat carrier and we all waded through floating furniture to the boat which was poking through the front door. With us in the boat they pushed it up the street to dry land. They deposited me, wife and cat, and headed back down the street for more rescues.
Never heard back from 911.
A few times when I was growing up.
A bad car accident in front of our house when I was 10ish.
The store across the street was broken into.
My parents were gone and us kids were alone. It sounded like there was someone outside the house.
As an adult, a friend called me to say she was committing suicide so I called 911 and gave the address. This was back in the 80s and the had those calls with recorded messages and wanting responses. I’d hang up and it would call again. I left messages with a lot of really foul language.
Despite having lived in Asia for so long, I’ve never had to call here.
I’ve only called 911 once and it was for a very minor issue. I was driving through the city and I saw a traffic light that had stopped working. I figured the police would want to know. I would have called them on their ordinary line but I didn’t know that number. So I called 911.
A couple of times. Once when my wife’s mother discovered her husband collapsed in the bathroom. Alas he’d had a stroke and didn’t recover.
And once in the UK (it’s 999 here) when a guy who looked homeless collapsed in the street outside our house.
Didn’t anyone think of that? You mean the homeowner (you!) when you bought?
While the FD may have a highwater vehicle or boat(s) they still need to get to your neighborhood. If they’re stationed on the other side of the raging-brook-turned-river or there are roads washed out or trees down they can’t magically get thru them.
During the last hurricane, we got one call for service. We took the boat in, around the corner. When we brought those people out I said something to the chief & he agreed, we then went back onto the street, knocking on doors, telling people this was their one chance to be rescued & that we weren’t coming back. (At that point, it was up about 6 steps from the sidewalk into the house & the house was already knee-deep…& still coming up, which means at/over waist deep on the sidewalk, in a flowing current. Not safe to walk around in w/o proper training & equipment. You can’t see the missing manhole cover, you can’t see your neighbor’s planter that moved from against their house to the middle of the sidewalk, creating a tripping hazard. We had calls stacking up while we were clearing that area.
Wow this is a good thread. Many of us, if not all of us, will likely need emergency services at one time or another.
This reminds me that I keep the non emergency number for our police department handy for situations that are not emergencies, but a time or two when I’ve called that number I was directed by them to call 911. 911 might be becoming the more standard way to reach services even if is not an emergency.
However, for things like cars parked on my street in front of my house for more than 72hrs, unmoved, my local PD has a dedicated number for that. And other numbers for other situations.
Thanks for this thread @Saint_Cad .
it is becoming more & more common. In the nearby big city, the only way to get an officer, for anything, it via 911. If you call the local precinct, they tell you to hang up & call 911. In the county where I am, if you call the local 10-digit #, especially outside of M-F 9-5 it rolls right up to & is answered by the county 911 center.
The advantage is that they have one central queue of all calls & can see when (even minor) calls are backing up & maybe even bump up the priority a bit of an older, low-priority call; there’s also cost savings in less dispatchers needed as you don’t need one at 911 & one at 10-digit phone #, maybe you need 1.x to handle the combined volume, but not two separate teams of 24x7 + overtime/time off fill ins
Here at least some of the police stations still have active non-emergency numbers.
I think I called the non-emergency number for the village police about a dog left in a car in hot weather; though I no longer remember which number I called, or whether they referred me to 911.
I do remember that we’d been discussing among the farmers’ market vendors fthe fact that there was a dog who’d been barking from the adjacent parking lot for quite a while; at intervals he’d shut up for a bit, then he’d start barking again. After some time of this I went down and found which car it was; car was in full sun, temperature outside was somewhere in the 80’s or 90’s I forget which, dog was panting and panting and barking. Car windows were cracked but not enough for the dog to get out or for me to try to get water in (not that water alone would have solved the problem). Car was locked. The car might have been in shade when parked – it was next to a line of trees just east of the lot – but if so the sun had moved and only a small bit of hood was shaded. I wrote down the plate number and called village police, giving them plate and location of car.
They showed up within 5 or 10 minutes and were about to break into the car when the car’s owner showed up, claiming he’d only been gone about 5 minutes or so to get some coffee. One of the police came up and talked to us, and got confirmation from multiple vendors that the dog had been barking much longer than ten minutes. They apparently read him a doozy of a lecture, but I don’t think he was charged; but at least the dog was OK, I hope not just temporarily.
Several times to report accidents, the credit union I used to work for was on a fairly busy street and people would run the red light regularly.
Once to report the attempted robbery of said credit union.
Once fairly recently to report someone trying to break into my neighbor’s car. He was unsuccessful and was already down the street presumably to try again when the cops showed up. I never did hear if they got him or not.
Several times
I was my dad’s caregiver for the last few years of his life. I called 911 many times for emergency health problems.
I’ve also called 911 a couple of times for suspected burglaries in progress. They turned out to be false alarms. In one case, I got home late at night and saw a guy with a flashlight run out into the street from a neighbor’s house and then run back. It turned out to be the neighbor himself chasing raccoons out of his yard.
Oh yeah. Neighbors across the street were having a crazy party with drunks in the front yard yelling some very dramatic stuff at 11PM. It looked sketchy enough to be a crack house.
I called 911 with the noise complaint and said “please do not come to my house, as I don’t want my neighbors to know I reported. Please just go to the noisy house at this address. It will be very obvious.”
20 minutes later they were knocking on my door, very conspicuously, asking me to point out the house. The noise didn’t stop. totally useless response.
Several times- once for myself, when I hurt my knee and my wife wasn’t able to help me get up or into the car. Once for a wreck at the end of my street- I heard the crash, went out into the yard to see what was up, and called 911 because it looked pretty serious.
The most recent was about 9 months ago when I saw a motorcyclist veer across 3 lanes of traffic to exit the freeway, nearly miss the crash barrels, and then smack into the side of a car on the access road, and launched himself off the bike. Don’t know how that turned out, but no “Motorcyclist died on Central Expressway this morning.” articles in the paper, so there’s that.
…In Soviet Russia… 
My daughter was very verbal very early. One day when she was a little over 2 years old my (then) wife heard her yelling from the living room “The Bad Boys are here! The Bad Boys are here!” My ex went to see what she was talking about and saw two cops walking up to the house. My daughter was very excited. When her mother wasn’t looking my daughter got ahold of a phone and called 911 looking for the Bad Boys. Apparently she had been paying attention when Cops was on.
I just called a couple weeks ago on a man in an adjoining apartment building, because he had a charcoal grill on his balcony, and flames shooting a couple feet above it. Not only did the fire department show up, but the rental office was still open, and I informed them about it too. He’s pretty intimidating, which is why I didn’t just holler, “Hey, you can’t do that here.”
When my nephew was maybe 6 or 7, he called 911 from a restaurant. My sister said he went to the bathroom and came back looking very sheepish. She asked what he had done and he said “nothing”. A few minutes later the cops came in. They gave him a very stern talking-to.