911

On March 3rd, a story came across the wire about a woman in Florida who had placed a 911 call from her local McDonalds. The emergency? They had run out of McNuggets and she wanted a refund. My first reaction was to do a mental double take. If I had been drinking water or coffee, I might have done a mental spit take. I decided to do a little research into the 3 number emergency call system which has saved countless lives and, as I came to find out, wasted countless hours of time with such inanities as McDonalds running out of McNuggets.
I found that the 911 system was initiated by B.W. (Bob) Gallagher - President of the Alabama Telephone Company a subsidiary of Continental Telephone. He then turned to Robert (Bob) Fitzgerald - Inside State Plant Manager who then engineered the needed circuitry for the first U.S. 911 system. The very first American 911 call was placed on February 16, 1968 in Haleyville, Alabama made by Alabama Speaker of the House, Rankin Fite and answered by Congressman Tom Bevill. The call was made at 2pm. There was no emergency, so, I suppose, this could easily be construed as also being the first 911 prank call. It certainly was not the last.
The 911 system was designed to give us the ability to dial a single number to report emergencies. The new emergency number had to be three numbers that were not in use in the United States or Canada as the first three numbers of any phone number or area code, and the numbers had to be easy to use. The new crime fighters best friend.
This is where the entitlement issue began to rear its ugly head as it became evident that one man’s emergency is another man’s folly.
I found a 911 call from a woman who wanted her dollar back because her taco wasn’t prepared the way she liked it. Another had a man telling the operator that 911 was a load of bull ( he went a little further than that) and, that if they wanted to do something productive, they could tell him where all of the butterflies in his yard had come from. I would make a horrible 911 operator, because I would have been tempted to answer: caterpillars. You can’t really display a sense of humor when manning the emergency phones as one guy found out when a woman called to complain that her 12 and 14 year old daughters were fighting and that the 12 year old was too big for her to stop. The operator asked “What do you want us to do, come over and shoot her?” He tried to explain that it was a joke, but, her focus suddenly shifted to getting his supervisor on the phone so she could report him, apparently forgetting about the girls, who, by this time, had thoroughly trashed the house and put holes in her wall. Another woman spent her entire 911 call complaining that the prior operator had hung up on her, adding, in what sounded like an alcohol induced slur, “Don’t you ever hang up on me again.”
Granted, the system works well for bona-fide emergencies. A 6 year old boy saved his grandmothers life by dialing 911, shootings and robberies have been thwarted because they were phoned in in time, even former Dallas Cowboy Terrell Owens could, conceivably have had his life saved when someone called in a report of a possible overdose. A lot of good comes from a system that works when it is not being abused, even if the abuse is unintentional. You just can’t tie up the line with questions like, “How do you put the batteries into a flashlight” or “Why are there so many vultures in the tree across the street.” And, as for the guy who called to say his Boochee was gone….well, like I said, one man’s emergency is another man’s missing Boochee.

THAT’S HOW I FEEL…….WHAT CAN I TELL YA’