911 is the emergency number here in Canada if you’re unfamiliar. 112, 999, etc if you’re elsewhere IIRC.
Do you remember the first time you had to use it?
What were you thinking, feeling?
First time I had to use it in earnest I was working front end at a post office and there was a random guy doing maintenance behind me in the back area of the office. Barely said a word to him, he barely said a word to me. I was fairly busy and he seemed kinda gruff.
Bit later all of a sudden he taps me on the shoulder pretty aggressively, I turned and was getting ready to give him some not-polite words about touching me like that and how he better not damn well do that again but I stopped when I saw the look on his face.
He just says, “call 911.”
I look blankly at him, getting some mental whiplash, and just dumbly go, “what?”
Him, “I’m having a fucking heart-attack, CALL 911!”
That got through so I called them, gave them the info. He went back into the office and laid down.
I was a bit in shock myself and just looked at the customers in line in front of me and said to the woman, “he’s having a heart attack, sorry.”
Honestly think I could’ve handled the situation better, at least gone back and been more empathetic but I was caught between him, customers, and making sure I was visible so I could wave the paramedics to where they needed to go.
The post office there was tucked into the back corner and most of the store didn’t even know about it until I told them later that day.
Never heard anything after, no clue if the guy survived, or not. Didn’t see him again either way.
You?
The first time I called 911 was actually to avoid being involved in/the victim of a crime.
I (~16m) was walking home very late at night with a friend, when a pickup truck passed us on the road, then suddenly pulled over blocking the sidewalk ~10m ahead of us.
4 guys got out and began to walk towards us rather aggressively.
I pulled out my phone and very loudly said ‘Hey google, Dial 911’.
All 4 stopped in their tracks. My friend and I didn’t stop; we walked around them and then their truck, and continued onto a path vehicles couldn’t follow, then we took off running as soon as we had rounded the corner out of sight.
For the record; I learned that day, google assistant won’t actually dial emergency numbers for you. (that may have changed, it’s been a long time and I’m not going to play with testing that) I’m really glad this encounter didn’t end poorly because apparently I hadn’t actually called for help.
These days at least some voice assistants can do it, I’ve gotten 911 calls that way. Might depend on the phone and software version.
Also fall or accident detections from someone dropping their phones.
And some phones have a setting where it’ll initiate a 911 call if you press the power button 5 times or something like that.
Always a good idea to take a few minutes to go through your phones settings to see which of these features you have turned on and whether you actually should have those turned on. You wouldn’t believe the amount of butt dials we get.
Also a reminder that deactivated phones without service can still call 911, a lot of people give their old phones to little kids to play with and we get a lot of calls that way. And little kids sometimes say some wild stuff, so you might just get fire engines showing up at your house because a kid said some magic words and we have to err on the side of caution.
And since I’m on that topic now, every agency varies a bit. Until fairly recently where I work, we could ignore most butt dials if we didn’t hear anything suspicious, but they recently changed that policy, so now as long as we have a decent location ping from your phone, we’re dispatching officers to all of them and have to call them back. I don’t think most of our departments put a whole lot of effort into trying to track people down, mostly they drive through the neighborhood looking for anything suspicious, and maybe try calling back themselves, but it’s still kind of a waste of time in most cases.
At my agency though, if you call accidentally but stay on the line and confirm there’s no emergency, we can still ignore it as long as we don’t hear anything suspicious going on. The second you hang up though without making contact, we have to enter the call, and try calling you back.
Protip- if we call you back, you don’t really have to answer or answer any questions if you do. But if you answer we have to try to verify your location, and if you give us that, a cops may still gonna come knocking at your door even if we tell them you said there was no emergency. Some cops and departments will take it at face value and disregard from there but it’s out of our hands at that point.
You’re not gonna get in trouble for an accidental call, it’s not a big deal, I get dozens, maybe hundreds of them every day. But if you want to avoid the aggravation, either stay on the line or ignore any incoming calls.
Again, those policies will vary a bit from one agency to another, I can only speak for where I work.
000 here is Australia. First time was a school friend came off his bike and dislocated his kneecap. Second was when I flayed my left arm. Third was when my cousin got home drunk as a skunk after rolling out of a moving taxi and getting pretty banged up. Fourth was to report a fire on the side of the highway during bushfire season.
In Australia we don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for an ambulance or for medical care. My friend who dislocated his kneecap was taken to hospital free of charge and had a quick surgery and immobilisation of the knee.
When I flayed my arm it was a fairly gory laceration down to the bone and required surgery to fix.
Overall the staff were extremely professional and understood what was happening quickly. They provided great advice and organised for help to arrive promptly. My experience with the ambulance was great, same with the whole hospital system, and I am happy to pay taxes for it.
Not exactly 911, but somewhat similar. A few years ago my wife & I were in a rental SUV while on vacation. It was a fairly new car with only something like 2000 miles on it. We were in the third lane of a 4 lane highway when a drunk driver hit us from behind with almost no warning. It caused our car to spin 360 degrees across 3 lanes before coming to a stop in the breakdown lane.
Within about 5 seconds of the car coming to a stop we heard a voice asking if we’d been in an accident and were we ok. It turns out the rental car had one of those OnStar types of services. We were so pumped full of adrenaline that it was all just a blur as we tried to remember what highway we were on, near what exit, etc. We were so panicked… Luckily a state trooper on a routine patrol stopped maybe a minute later so we didn’t have to keep trying to figure out how to tell the OnStar person where we were.
My model female cousin (usually most of those details wouldn’t matter, but they sort of do in this anecdote) once broke down on the side of the road in broad daylight. Apparently someone, a man, pulled over and offered to help her, but then immediately started attempting to abduct her.
I was a kid when all of this happened, so all I know is what I overheard my mom saying on the phone when relaying the story to someone else; but apparently the cousin in question decided “I’m either going to die here or get away, I’m not going to let him take me.” From my memory of this secondhand story, she screamed, shouted and struggled, but was entirely ignored by everyone traveling the busy highway where she’d broken down. Eventually an off-duty cop (this was in the late nineties, I think) stopped at the side of the road and rescued her. I don’t know what happened after (except that said cousin is still around).
I’m proud of her for defending herself. So was my mom, which is why I overheard that story.
First time living alone. Neighbor had some unwelcome company. Gun shots ensued. I laid down in the bathtub and called 911 for the first, and hopefully, last time. Not a great night.
At that same place, a guy once knocked on my back window to ask if I wanted to smoke meth with him. I have never smoked meth and this was the first and only time ive ever seen this man. I asked him wtf his problem was and he said he was hiding from the cops which opened up so many more questions than I wanted to actually ask him. So I told him about a secluded spot (allegedly/parody/etc) down the very narrow alley he definitely struggled to fit into and he crab walked the rest of the way down, never to bother me again. I fucking hate texas.
According to the training at various jobs I’ve held, if gunshots are likely to be a threat, you should lay down wherever is available and put your knees under your chest to kink up your body.
The reasoning given was that bullets tend to travel in a straight line, so if you minimize the straight lines in your body, you’re in less danger. This never really made sense to me, but it’s what I was officially told.
If you were in something like a cast iron tub, that might protect you, but I doubt any modern tub would make much of a difference.
I’m glad you survived your experience!
I was a teen, staying up late, probably watching videos on my phone when I heard arguing from down the street. I peeked out of my bedside window. I couldn’t really see them, but it was a couple who got lost at night. I listened to them arguing for some time, annoyed at first, trying to figure out if I could help them somehow, or could at least let them know to tone it down. I couldn’t make everything out, but I believe at one point the woman shouted “hit him”. It took me a moment to summon the courage to call the police, wondering if this was really an emergency, but as they were still arguing I called it in, nervously shaking.
I told them that I felt the woman was threatening the man, and they agreed to send someone over. Ten minutes later they got back into the car and drove off before the police arrived.
One time coming back from work late at night there was a car stopped in the road about 2 houses down from my house. There was a couple arguing, one of them standing outside the cars the other one inside.
They were yelling and making a bit of a ruckus, but nothing that was exactly going to wake up the neighbors (although that may say more about how few fucks anyone in that neighborhood gave than about how loud they were being)
And honestly I would have been happy to leave them to it, even though it was like 11pm, except that they were blocking the road and I wanted to go to bed.
They were oblivious to me sitting behind them, flashing my high beams, I may have even honked at them, it’s been probably 15+ years so I can’t remember for certain.
So I called 911, gave them the details, turned around and went around the block to get home.
Sat on my porch for a few minutes watching the show to make sure it didn’t escalate (didn’t really think it was going to, my neighborhood was pretty chill overall, we just had a few loudmouths who didn’t know how to shut up) until the cops arrived, then I went in and went to bed. Don’t know what happened from there, I assume the cops basically just told them to shut up and go home.
If they just pulled over they could have kept arguing all night for all I cared. I would’ve slept through it.
I was driving on the highway when the truck in front of me started swerving subtly and strangely. I told my copilot that the truck driver was probably texting.
As I changed lanes to pass the truck, I asked my copilot if they could see the truck driver texting. But I couldn’t pass the truck because the truck swerved violently to the lane I was going to use.
That’s when it hit me: this driver was very drunk. I immediately grabbed my phone and gave it to my copilot and told them to call the police. I was horrified because the truck was massive and we were getting close to a highway exit that sometimes has traffic.
We gave the police the details: the license plate, the location, the way the guy was driving, and they said they were going to send someone.
I stayed behind the truck for a couple of minutes. We didn’t want to pass him and have him crush our car. So we just looked at how this drunk guy swerved, accelerated, and broke erratically.
After some time, we finally got to the area with traffic, and luckily the truck driver stopped and didn’t crash into anything. We heard sirens behind us and that’s when I decided to finally pass the truck and keep driving.
I’ve called for drunk or similarly erratic drivers a few times. One of them was in a tanker truck and had several near-misses before he found a place to stop. The cops started following and he tightened up his driving. I’m not sure if they actually contacted him.
Family argument got so loud and I got scared, like it felt like there was about to be a fight, or maybe there was already a fight… memory is blurry… I remember one of those incidents, either my parents or my older brother threw objects at each other…
I called and didn’t feel brave enough to actually say anything, just hung up. Nothing happened.
Oh jeez the flashbacks are coming back…
this happens a lot, I would often just have 911 ready
it’s not like I trust cops, there’s no other option, so I was just yolo-ing it, I was scared, idk what I’m supposed to do.
one time I got through and like just let the phone listen to the argument in the background, but then I got so scared I hung up
again, nothing happened, I was more afraid of my parents getting mad at me for getting the law involved.
its always just parents vs older brother arguments…
you gotta understand, this is the brother that I remember when I was like 5 or something, he tied me up with zipties, and once I got so scare of him chasing me around the house, my undeveloped brain made the stupid decision to just leave the apartment and I went looking for my mother at her workplace.
I think I hung up on 911 because I still… dispite being a decade here, felt alien to this place. Abusive family members felt more “closer” than everyone else in society.
wtf
If we were still in China, I might’ve have the courage to actually say “family violence” into the phone. (and probably get ignored since China doesn’t care about family violence anyways)
oh fuck fuck fuck that memory was so scary.
not just once, it happened multiple times
thinking about it makes my heartbeat go up
Childhood trauma is horrible, I’m sorry ): you deserved a safe home, and it’s tragic you felt so scared that you had to call the cops.
Just commenting so hopefully I remember to check back in on this thread later, I work in a 911 dispatch center.
Currently I’m on my break, but we’re dealing with some high winds knocking down trees and power lines and such and things so things are kind of blowing up for us (sometimes literally, more than a few transformers have popped) if things die down later I’ll try to chime in, answer questions, maybe share some stories.
Neat, be interesting to hear from the horses mouth. (At it were.)
Dunno if I could do your job, good on ya. All the times I’ve had to phone 911 they’ve been calm and collected and it’s certainly helped keep me calm as well. (The above story sadly is just the first time.)
Yeah that’s kind of the goal. At my dispatch center we have this big tacky sign by one of our entrances “The calm voice in the night”
To which I always kind of add in my head “asking you to please step outside and talk to the officer knocking at your door”
To get to your main question, my first time calling 911 was for my parked vehicle (well technically my dad’s vehicle, I was about 18, still living at home and using my parents cars since they had 3) getting hit and ran at my job (different job)
Nothing too special there. I didn’t see it but a couple other people did. It was a work truck that did it, and they were able to get the company name for me. Gave them the location, description of the truck, and waited around for an officer to come take a report. I take a good handful of calls like that every single day now.
Parents still have that vehicle too. 1993 Ford ranger, just recently rolled over 100k miles, I’m proud to have been driving it when it happened, had to borrow it to move some stuff and the timing worked out. I love that truck.
The other guy of course denied everything, and there wasn’t really any conclusive evidence that pinned it to a specific person or vehicle for that company, so nothing much came of it, and all the damage was a broken tail light, not really worth making an insurance claim over or making much of a fuss about. Another guy I worked with worked part time for a mechanic and hooked me up with a good deal on a new tail light assembly. Swapped it out right there in the parking lot of the pizza shop I worked at one night.
I did chime in with some thoughts and rants on some of the other replies here in case you haven’t seen them.
Driving between fields on a bike with my 5yo son on the back.
Noticed a person lying between the mounts of an asparagus field a little bit off, not moving.
Some offroad meters later we were standing besides him.
I checked for life signs, he was still alive, but not responsive.
Temperatures were around 10°C and sinking, so potentially life-threatening.
Called 112 (German emergency line). Lady on the other end was very friendly and well structured, asked me all the relevant details.
Just as she was about to send an ambulance, the man suddenly moved.
I kept the emergency line active while I tried to bring him to full consciousness and talk to him.
After a while he stood up slightly unsteady.
Did speak almost no German (nor English), only some Eastern European language.
But was enough to make it clear to me that he just had been drinking a little too much and felt fit to go home by himself.
Told the lady on the line that the crisis had been averted. She was very positive overall and told me that I had done exactly the right thing by calling.Don’t be afraid to call!
I was in a car accident. On my way back to the office from lunch out and this woman made a left turn from the opposite side in front of me. I basically t-boned her at 50-55mph. We were both okay, just shocked, but our cars were blocking the intersection. She kept saying I was going too fast and that she was driving home from church. I just sat down on the sidewalk waiting for cops and tow truck to show up. Funny enough I remember, even though my car couldn’t go anywhere, I turned off the engine, got out, and still locked the car.
I had to hitch a ride with the tow truck to their office so I at least had some shelter (middle of summer with no shade around) and wait for a taxi to pick me up. The other woman had her husband pick her up.
First time? Uhh. I think it was a car crash that rolled an SUV onto our driveway.
Since then, a couple wildfires, usually already reported, but I don’t want the bystander effect to cause the fire to spread. Several other car crashes, one I parked in front of a motorcycle that went down and another where a drunk man took down a street light and got his car stuck. One I directed others to call for a heart attack and another I was doing CPR and had someone else call for a cardiac arrest.
Never been scared to call, usually just what had to be done. I learned some time that it was better for a dozen people to call than for no one to, assuming someone else would call. It’s not like there is a downside to calling.
I’ve never had to be the one to call, which is good, my brain and words would just be going “the thingy is doing thingy! Help!”
Closest as we smelled burning in the house and called the non emergency number. Fire department is literally within walking distance but they sent an entire truck…
A wooden spoon had fallen in the dishwasher and into the heating element. It was smoldering.
I was driving behind someone who was going way too fast and recklessly. Not on the highway or anything, a city street that people live on, walk on, etc. When he opened his door and dropped an empty liquor bottle on the ground I called 911. Followed him as safely as I could for a little while to try to give the best info about his location. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t even dispatch someone, let some catch him. But man, that boiled my blood. Piece of trash two times over.
I work in 911 dispatch, reckless driver calls are one of the more annoying calls for us to handle
And to be clear, I’m not saying don’t call for a reckless driver, I’ve done it myself a couple of times since I’ve been working here. They are an emergency and we do treat it as such, but they’re still a pain.
This isn’t directed at you specifically, this is just a general rant on the topic.
First of all, we never want anyone to follow a reckless driver. If they’re speeding, aggressively weaving through traffic, running red lights, etc. and you’re trying to keep up with them guess what, we’ve got two reckless drivers now.
And of course if they think you’re following them, they’re probably going to drive even more recklessly, or worse they do something stupid like try to run you off the road or pull a gun on you or something. Crazy shit happens like that all the time, I live and work in what I’d consider a pretty safe area, but barely a week goes by where I don’t see a call go in about someone waving a gun in traffic. This week it was a fucking shotgun.
But of course no matter how much we tell people not to follow, some idiots want to play at being an action hero and won’t stop. The worst about this is probably off-duty officers, it’s like dude you don’t have flashing lights on your personal vehicle, you’re not in uniform, and you’re not getting paid for this shit, the fuck are you doing? You look for all the world like some crazy wannabe vigilante, and that’s kind of what you actually are right now.
At least at my agency, if you just happen to be heading the same direction as them, we’ll stay on the line giving our cops location updates, but again, we really don’t want you following them.
The other issue is that often there’s just not a cop conveniently nearby and available. In the area I work, we have some semi-rural areas, with towns that are physically large, but low population so nothing much ever happens there, and there might only be one or two officers on duty at any given time, and that’s all they really need. If they’re tied up on something or just happen to be on the other side of the town, odds are they can’t catch up in time. They might make a real effort to do it, but the odds aren’t in their favor.
Then we have smaller, denser towns with a lot of officers, but a lot of those towns keep their officers busy. Is it worth diverting an officer from a domestic for a reckless driver that they may not be able to catch up to? Probably not in most cases.
And sometimes you’re crossing jurisdictions, so even if we’re giving them constant updates, we can only get the information passed along to the next department down the roads so quickly and we don’t know where they may be turning up ahead to try to get someone in position.
There’s one highway in my county where different stretches of it are covered by different departments. Depending on traffic you could pass through parts of it covered by 2 different state police barracks and 4 different local departments across 3 counties in the space of about 10 minutes, and you can add in a few more departments if they get off the highway at certain points and make certain turns. Trying to get someone in a position to intercept there is a nightmare, and you might have to get transferred between a couple different dispatch centers along the way.
There’s also location. Yes we get a location from your phone, but it’s not always super accurate, and it doesn’t always update quickly, which makes it almost useless when we’re trying to pinpoint a moving vehicle. If they’re flying along at 60mph, they might be a half mile away from where we got our last ping before it updates again, and that ping might only be accurate to within a few hundred meters which could put them somewhere on any number of different roads.
So we’re really relying on our callers to give us a good location, and frankly people just never have any clue where the hell they are, the name of the road, an address a cross street, a nearby business (that’s something identifiable, because dude there are like 5 Sunocos along that main road in that town, you need to be a little more specific) and of course trying to get a direction of travel is like pulling teeth. I don’t need north/south/east/or west even, just something like “they’re heading towards the mall” wound be great.
And even getting a vehicle description from our callers is an adventure sometimes. You wouldn’t believe how many people out there can’t tell if they’re looking at a sedan or a pickup truck when it’s right there in front of them, let alone a color, make/model, or license plate number.
And let’s say we actually manage to get a good description, we get a cop out there and he’s following behind the vehicle. How many of them keep driving like assholes with a cop right behind them? Not many. At that point it’s your word against theirs, and the cop isn’t witnessing them doing anything wrong. Sure, sometimes it happens, but most of the time there’s nothing actionable going on by the time the cops get out there. Maybe they can drum up enough of a reason to pull them over, but if they didn’t see anything serious and the driver doesn’t appear visibly intoxicated, what can they really do from that point?
And of course you also get the really delayed and vague reports like “a red car cut me off somewhere near a Starbucks at about 8 this morning” when it’s like 9 pm and they have no other description. What are we honestly supposed to do with that?
But man, when the stars align and we can actually get a cop out to pull over a reckless driver, at least I personally think that’s one of the most satisfying calls I can take.
A friend of mine had a similar situation, although this was on a highway with someone driving slowly and weaving everywhere. The cops did show up after his call, though, I think while he was on the phone with the dispatcher.
15 years ago, young student, I’m walking home around midnight. In the middle of a bridge I see a human shape jumping in the water. I’m not 100% sure. I ask a group of people further up on the bridge if they saw anything, they didn’t, but said I still should call 112.
One or two police cars came, and then one (or 2?) fire truck. Lots of people. Some went with full diving equipment in the water.
They couldn’t find anyone, said it was surprising as the water was very low. The fireman captain gave me the stinkeye.
Police had left their lightbar on and the car wouldn’t start (I think that was the reason) so I helped to push.
I had to come to the police station and tell what I saw many, many times.
Only years later did I realize I was being interrogated, to find out if my story had holes. I was quite naive (dumb works too).I wasn’t drunk, depressed, or had any kind of weird fantasies that would make me want to invent a story. It’s the only time I called the cops in my life.
All cops were friendly, even though they must’ve thought I was lying or had too much imagination.
Did someone jump? Now I think not. But at the time I really thought there was a possibility, and I wouldn’t take any chances. I just didn’t realize how many people and resources would be involved.
I forgot: I called two more times recently because my phone screen would not turn on, and apparently there’s a setting in LineageOS to call the emergencies if you fiddle with the buttons, so as to make the situation even worse, and then there’s a voice telling you you’re about to talk to someone and you can’t hang up! (Edit: I suppose they would call back in any case).
Happened twice before I found the setting. So yeah, I wasted their time, again.
I was sitting at a stop sign, waiting to turn right, and watched a horrible car accident happen right in front of me. A small car had pulled out into the intersection just before I pulled up to the stop. It slowed down, in the middle of the road, maybe it stalled, I don’t know. I looked to the left and saw a pickup truck coming around the curve, going too fast, straight toward the car. The truck hit the small car so hard that it launched into the air and rolled, landing on its roof. A couple got out of the small car, apparently uninjured. I read in the news the next day that the truck driver died.
I’d had a cell phone for less than a year at that point, this was a long time ago. I called 911, and by the time I was done with the call, traffic had backed up behind the cars, and people were out surrounding both cars. So, I just continued on home.
