Never done it before. It wasn’t really an emergency (at least I don’t think it was). I was walking to my subway stop when I saw a man lying in an alley, which unfortunately is not an unusual site in center city Philadelphia. But, I found it odd that he was wearing expensive clothing and partially lying in a shallow puddle. People were walking past him without noticing. I couldn’t tell if he was asleep, unconscious, or dead and I didn’t want to get close enough to find out. I called the local PD and they instructed me to dial 911. They sent someone to check on the guy.
Yup.
I’ve called 911 before while I was on the Dallas North Tollway. I spotted a car pulled over, and the driver appeared to be slumped over the wheel. By the time it occurred to me that I should pullover, I was too far ahead to do so safely. I figured that calling 911 would get the situation checked out faster than it would take me to pull off, turn around, go back three miles, turn around again, get back on the tollway, yadda yadda, and all in the middle of morning rush hour.
Yeah, except, I’d kind of counted on the cellular 911 network to have their butts figured out. I got transferred at least three times and had to repeat my information that many times. First, the spot was close to county lines, and they had to figure out which county to send me to. Then, someone realized that as I was on the Tollway, that fell under a completely different jurisdiction, and transferred me again.
Yes, technological changes bring growth pains, and correlating cell phone calls with 911 emergency calls with jurisdiction boundaries is sure to make a nightmare I wouldn’t want to touch. Blech.
I sure hope that lady got help before lunchtime.
Good for you. You may have just saved someone’s life.
I’ve called 911 a bunch of times, but only a couple where I thought someone’s health was in real danger.
I once had to call 911 three times in the* same day*. I got home on a Saturday and ran over the spigot for the garden hose. I called the city to get them to shut the water off, and their after business answering machine said to call 911 to get dispatch to send somebody to shut off the water at the meter. The guy who came said to just call 911 when I fixed it, and he’d come back out and turn it on again.
When I got home from the hardware store, there was a drunk Indian on my porch. I couldn’t tell if it was a male or female, and I couldn’t get them to respond to me, so I had to call 911 for the second time to get them to take this person somewhere else.
On another occasion, I accidentally called 911 because the cordless phone we had didn’t instantly recognize the base when you hit TALK. So, when I tried to call xx9-11xx, 911 answered asking what my emergency was. :eek:
Different tollway–actually, I wasn’t on a toll road, but I recently drove by someone who was waving his arms trying to get someone to stop. I was uncomfortable trying to stop and help the guy, and so didn’t stop, and I didn’t bother to call 911 for fear of your exact situation–especially since I was not local to the area where I saw the guy. I hope he got help in a reasonably timely manner.
That’s been a problem on some occasions where a computer dials from a place of business. Dial 9 for an outside line, then 1 for the long distance call, then… Oops.
I called 911 once, I meant to dial 411 and pushed 911 for some reason. I hung up right away and they called me back. Nice of them.
I also did that once at the store I worked at when I had to call internatonal. We had to dial 9 for an outside line…
I pressed the buttons too fast and called 9-1-1 instead of 9-0-1-1- (011 is for int’l codes).
Funny cause not only did I get emergency but apparently at my store when you dial 9-1-1 it sets off an alarm and notifies the general manager of trouble.
If you call accidentally and hang up, they pretty much have to send someone anyway, right?
It drives me up the wall in TV shows/movies where 911 dispatchers either don’t take someone seriously because they may be joking and hang up, or don’t call back after you hang up quickly. Although there was that case in Detroit of a little boy who repeatedly called because his mother fell unconscious and the dispatcher assumed he was just playing with the phone.
The only time I called was when we were on the freeway and noticed a brushfire that had just started. When the operator answered she said, “Are you calling about the brushfire?” Apparently a few other people had noticed it, too.
I did the opposite once. In the time I wasted, the crook got away.
I called for a similar reason as the OP a couple months ago. I was at a friend’s apartment about a mile from ASU and I saw someone lying down on the other side of the street. I thought it was a student who had gotten too fucked up the night before and passed out or fell down and hurt himself trying to walk back to his dorm. It was across a busy 5-lane road so I called 911 and told them what was up before a spot opened up for me to cross. When I got there it turned out to be a homeless guy who had laid down because he figured it’d be a good place to take a nap. The cops and fire department weren’t happy with me when they got there (about 1 minute after I did.)
Not sure–suspect there may not be a universal answer to this question.
I can tell you that when my sister-in-law had a pan catch on fire, called 911, put the fire out and called 911 again, the nice firemen showed up anyway to investigate the matter. It was policy not to take someone’s word for it that the fire was now out. Which actually makes a lot of sense to me, given the potential for something to still be smoldering and potentially likely to re-ignite a fire. But sis-in-law was embarassed–especially because of how easily the fire went out when she tackled it. (If I recall the details correctly, she left something in a pan on the stove, went to take a 20 minute nap, and woke up an hour or more later to either a fire alarm or a smoke-filled kitchen (or both). Once the pan had been placed outdoors away from the heat, it quit burning. The fire may have been extinguished before the hot pan was taken outdoors.)
I called them on Saturday, because the car ahead of us, whose smoke was visible from a quarter mile back, had pulled off the same exit we chose and was sitting on the side of the road, burning. Flames shooting out the bottom, and three confused guys wandering around the sidewalk.
Fricking fracking streets department, there were NO names at this intersection. NONE. I just gave them names of the businesses I was looking at until someone else called in and was able to clarify the exact location.
That’s the policy here (found that out when I was playing with a phone… I must’ve been five I guess)
I heard about that one. 
Last time I called 911 in earnest was a year ago I guess. I heard something happening out front of my house and looked out the window, saw a guy jump on the hood of a car and smash the windshield in as the driver was trying to pull away. The guy then ran off before the cops got there. The driver was a woman, who was trying to help another girl who’d had a nasty fight with her boyfriend at a nearby restaurant. The guy had circled around and got pissed off at the ‘interference’.
I’ve called 911 many times. I’ve been living in a bad neighborhood in West Philadelphia for the past four years. (As a pint-sized woman, I’m not afraid to call if I think there’s trouble)
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I was walking back from class and I saw four kids on bikes chasing a college student while shouting, “I’m going to take your bike! It’s ours now!” Thought that merited a call.
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Heard a nasty fight going on in the alley behind my apartment between a guy and his girlfriend. I’m nosy and it was the basic, “It’s not over yet!”. That is, until he started hitting her.
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I was half-asleep one night and heard a commotion outside my window. A group of neighborhood kids were beating a student senseless in the street. I was so disturbed by the sight that I shouted for them to stop, and that I was calling the police. They ran away.
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I’ve had tons and tons of minor incidents that almost merit phone calls. For instance, today, I was walking down my street and some guy was walking down the opposite side of the street. He was shouting things pretty loudly to no one in particular. This worried me when he started saying, “Girl! Girl all alone!” So I had the 911 number ready on my cellie if he decided to start walking towards me.
I called 911 when I came home to find our carport door standing open. Luckily it turned out that my husband had been distracted that morning by going out to leave for work and finding one of his tires flat, and had to change a tire and call in late and such, and forgot to lock the door. It probably fell open. However this was right after the fifth victim of the “Baton Rouge Serial Killer” was found, and frankly, there was no way in f’ing hell I was going into that house without a cop checking it out first. Four of the five known victims at that time had been abducted from within three miles of my house. Paranoid, maybe, but I was paranoid in my car with a cell phone.
I called 911 once. It was, bar none, the scariest moment of my life, which I’ve talked about before here.
I also had a good friend growing up whose phone would always dial 1 twice, even if you hit it once. So, any number that started with 91… They had to get a new phone.
'Round these parts they always send somebody – eventually – even if you tell them it was by mistake. Some years back my daughter called 911 instead of 411, realized the mistake right away and told the dispatcher sorry, it was a mistake. She then got the info from 411 and went out. About a half hour or so later, there was a police officer at our door. I explained, and he continued asking, “So, does she do that often?” and wanted to know where she had gone, etc., all the while trying to look past me into the house. Finally I said, look, I’m not going to let you in. My husband is ill (true) and I don’t want you to come in, and I want to close the door now. There’s nothing wrong here that needs your attention, thank you. After which he left, although I did notice he sat in the car outside for a goodly while.
i’ve called twice.
first, when the lovely neighbours across the alley thought it would be fun to break my bedroom window in the middle of the night. people up and down the street had been calling and registering complaints.
second, on vacation in st. louis. there was a heck-of-a car crash. i was about a half a block away. amazingly, no other cars or people stopped. they just took a quick look and moved on. in the midwest!!! what is happening to our heartland?!
i called and had to stall a bit until i got to the intersection and could see the street signs, and the condition of the people involved. woman in suv had seat belt on, man in red sports car did not. neither car was drivable, one was leaking. both people shook up, the guy kept rubbing his sternum.
once the fd and pd got there, THEN cars and people stopped. i left my name and address, and moved on once the pros got there.
i’m glad you called. after the incident at 13th and market it is good to know someone is looking out for others.
one of the partners at a firm i worked at collapsed on his way home for lunch. he collapsed on a main street, where people saw him and did all they could. if he had been a half a block further on his usual route, you would have described him perfectly. he would cut through a wee tiny alley to get to his delancy house (which is a wee, little, out of the way, street).