911 is meant to be dialed in case of an emergency, but for a lot of people, they clearly don't understand what a real emergency is. From funny to annoying to just plain
Don’t Forget Your Meds.
“I got a 911 call from a female for her husband having chest pains. The ambulance checked on the scene and it ended up being a schizophrenic male chasing a female (and now my ambulance guys) with a machete. He then took off into the woods naked with said machete. Officers got dispatched and couldn’t find him, a helicopter got sent and couldn’t find him. I got a second 911 call from a cell phone pinging next door about an hour later from a man laying on a garage floor saying a demon attacked him and he couldn’t get up. I thought maybe the first naked guy had attacked him. That caller ended up being the naked guy with the machete. He hit himself with the machete. Officers got there and he started stabbing himself in the chest. They tazed him, disarmed him, took him to the hospital, and got him on meds. He barely had cuts (dull blade?) He’s fine now. He brought us cookies last weekend.”
The Missing Mustard Jar.
“Years ago when I was a new dispatcher in TX, I got a call from a male talking very slowly and softly. The conversation went like this:
911: What’s your emergency?
Caller: Hi, I had a friend over, and I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, my friend was gone and so is the mustard jar that was on the table.
911: Uhhhhh, ok… what did you need? Are you worried about your friend? (In my head: are you mad he took your mustard?)
Caller: No. I’m on the couch and I can’t move. We were playing around, and I think maybe the mustard jar is inside me.
I sent the fire department who told me later that the French’s mustard jar, the old glass ones shaped somewhat like a big apple was in fact in his rectum. He was taken to the ER where they had to break the jar in order to remove it.”
Quite A Few.
“There was a lady in her 80s, who, after her husband died, called 911 to get someone to open a bottle of beer for her. Since she lives alone now she calls routinely but doesn’t get chastised for it – we simply send an officer over. Nothing like small town living!
I received a patient into my ER who had called 911 to report his steering wheel had been stolen. When the officers showed up the man was in the backseat on the driver’s side, very intoxicated, patting the back of the seat, obviously unable to find the steering wheel.
Also I’ve had several instances of patients who call 911 from the Emergency Room because they are unhappy with being kept there. Some of them have even accused the ER staff of kidnapping them and/or holding them hostage.”
No Free Tacos.
“Honest to God true story. I was not in my restaurant at the time this happened.
A little background. I own an AUTHENTIC Mexican restaurant. We do not put any other toppings on our tacos except cilantro and onions. If someone wants cheese, sour cream, etc. there is an extra charge.
A woman came in and ordered one taco and ate it. THEN told the cashier that she wanted a free taco because the one she had completely eaten did not have cheese on it… OR give her money back.
My cashier refused to make a free taco and also refused to give the $2 back.
The woman called 911.
Two officers arrived and tried to talk sense into the customer. The customer then called 911 AGAIN and demanded that a supervisor be sent out. Which they did.
At this point my cashier called me and I headed there as fast as I could.
In the meantime, the POLICE tried to convince my cashier to just give the customer a taco or $2 just to defuse the situation.
Normally I would agree except this sort of thing happens all the time in the neighborhood I am in and we don’t want to encourage this behavior.
When I arrived there were 8 police officers and a very vocal customer basically taking over my entire small 10 table restaurant.
I asked everyone to go outside and we could discuss this without bothering the rest of the customers in the restaurant.
I held the door open for the police and the irate customer as they all filed outside.
I then closed and locked the door.
Problem Solved.”
Ow!
“We got a call one day for an, ‘Unknown disturbance, man bleeding in the back of the house.’
Unknown disturbance can be anything from a dog pooping on someone’s yard or a murder attempt in progress. We aren’t, for some reason, getting enough information.
I was secondary on the call and arrived at the same time as the primary. When we approached the house there was a lady on the front porch. The following was said…
Primary: Good afternoon, Ma’am. What’s going on here?
Lady: Do you know what foreskin is?
Me: Primary: Umm… ya. What happened? Lady: They got caught. Me: Primary: Where is the man? Lady: In the house. We followed her into a completely empty house and in the next room over, there is a very large African American male with his shorts around his ankles and a wad of paper towel held around his junk, full of blood. Me: Primary: So what happened? Lady: Well, his foreskin got caught in my braces and ripped off when I pulled away. Me: Paramedics: What’s going on? Me: The guy’s foreskin got ripped off. Good luck with this one. Later that day, the officer whose beat it was came in to finish his reports. I asked what happened with the call and he said that the guy was at the bus station, some guy approached him and offered oral services for $50. He had a girl he was working with, she got $25, he got $25. So they walked over to this house and attempted to seal the deal. I asked what he did with the case and he said it was a prostitution charge. I couldn’t help but ask why he didn’t charge her with practicing medicine without a license and conducting illegal circumcisions.” “Caller: My cat got out and is stuck up in a tree. 911: I’m sorry to hear that. What did you need? Caller: I want the fire department to get her out. 911: I’m afraid the fire department doesn’t do that. Caller: Yes, they do. I’ve seen it in movies. 911: Maybe movie fire departments do, but ours doesn’t. Caller: Then what am I supposed to do? 911: Wait. The cat will come down on its own. Caller: No, it won’t! It’s stuck up there. 911: If the cat climbed up the tree, it can climb down the tree. Caller: You don’t know that! How do you know my cat won’t be stuck up there forever and die? 911: Have you ever seen a cat skeleton up in a tree?” “On the day in 1979 that Skylab crashed to earth, I was sent on an emergency call to a residence because, ‘a piece of the spacecraft had crashed in some guy’s driveway.’ When I arrived I saw a small crowd of people standing around the driveway. I stepped forward and saw what they were looking at. It was a broken ‘glow-in-the-dark’ stick, which was cracked and had some of the liquid coming out of it. We used them sometimes for traffic control. I guess the homeowner (and the small crowd) did not recognize it. As I stepped forward to pick it up, the homeowner gasped, and screamed that I was going to get radiation poisoning. It was a little like the scene in ‘Caddyshack’ when Bill Murray finds a Baby Ruth candy bar at the bottom of the evacuated swimming pool. I told the guy what it was, and felt pretty bad for him when his neighbors called him an idiot and his wife called him something worse.” “My real estate agent’s wife worked as a 911 dispatcher for a while near Palos Verdes, which can be a bit on the expensive side. Two calls stuck in her mind; one was that a resident on the seaward side called to ask the police to do something about the surf – it was just too loud; it was too hard to sleep with the waves crashing. By far the more self-absorbed though was the call to complain about the noise of low flying helicopters. These helicopters were carrying water to fight a fire. Yes, a fire in the same area. You would think older rich people would be leaning toward the hard of hearing side; my thought on writing this is that maybe the root cause was a bad batch of hearing aid batteries that were running at twice normal voltage.” “I called 911 a few years back, and I recently found out that the dispatchers still laugh about that call. It WAS quite funny, at least at that point… Anyway, here’s what happened: I was living in a large house with three other girls my age, and we had this neighbor who was crazy. Like, really crazy. He was about our age (mid-twenties) and he had schizophrenia. He would make loud goat noises and sometimes would stand on his patio singing ’90s songs at the top of his lungs. He lived with his dad, but stayed home alone all day while his dad went to work. After we had been living there for several months, little things started happening that gave us the impression that someone was watching us, like a peeping tom. These things would almost always happen while there was only one of us home. We suspected the crazy neighbor (we called him ‘Goat-Man’), but we had no evidence that he was doing anything illegal. One day, I was in my backyard and smelled smoke. And the smoke smelled…really strange. I realized it was coming from Goat-Man’s backyard, so I pulled a chair up to the fence and climbed up to look at what he was doing. I saw him hooting and hopping around a small fire on the ground, and when I looked closely, I noticed that he was burning s–t. Yes, poop. Now, keep in mind, Goat-Man didn’t have a dog… I didn’t know WHO the HECK to call in such a strange situation. The police? The fire department? The Department of Environmental Quality? So I called 911. I told the dispatcher who answered that my crazy neighbor was burning human excrement in his backyard. She said, ‘He’s burning human feces?’ I confirmed. There was a long pause, and then she said, ‘Please hold for a moment.’ Before she placed me on hold, I heard her start laughing hysterically. When she returned, she had only one question for me: ‘Is the fire in an enclosed pit?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but, trust me, THAT is not the problem here.’ ‘But that is city code, and if it’s not in an enclosed pit, then we can send a police officer,’ she said. ‘Oh,’ I replied. ‘Well, it’s definitely not in an enclosed pit.’ She told me that she would send out an officer, and we ended the call. The less funny part of this story is that a few months later, I heard Goat-Man arguing with a younger guy who had begun renting the extra room in the house. They were yelling about Goat-Man’s musical choices. About 30 minutes later, Goat-Man had started another fire in the backyard. I chose not to get involved in this one, and continued getting ready to leave for work. As I was leaving, about four police cars were pulling up to Goat-Man’s house, sirens blaring. I thought, ‘Hmm, this is not how they responded to the last fire…’ and soon learned that they weren’t there because of the fire. They were there because Goat-Man had stabbed his roommate like fifty times following the argument about his music. The fire I smelled this time was Goat-Man burning the bloody clothing and towels. Maybe if someone had taken some action when they realized there was an unsupervised schizophrenic lighting human s–t on fire, that kid renting the room would be alive today.” “This is the cutest one. A small boy to 911 emergency and the conversation went like this: Operator- 911 emergencies boy- Yeah, I need some help. Operator- What’s the matter? Boy- With my math. Operator- With your mouth? Boy- No, with my math. I have to do it. Will u help me? Operator- Sure, where do you live? Boy – No ,with my math. Operator- Yeah I know, where do you live though? Boy- I want you to talk me on the phone. Operator- What kind of problem do you have? Boy- It’s take away. Operator- Ok what’s the problem? Boy- Umm it’s with my math. Operator- Okay tell me what the math is? Boy- 16 take away 8 is what? Operator- How much do you think it is? Boy- I don’t know… 1? Operator- What’s another problem, that was a tough one. Boy- It’s 5 take away 5 is what. Operator- Mmm, 5 take away 5, how much do you think that is? Boy- 5. Woman- Johnny, what do you think you are doing? Boy- Policeman is helping me with my math. Woman- What did I tell you about going on the phone? Boy- You said if I need help to call somebody. Woman- I didn’t mean the police!!!” “I don’t work as a 911 operator, but heard the story from a police officer that I know. I happened to be homeless at the time and when this incident occurred, I was at work and I wish I was there to witness it. There was a ‘mentally ill’ woman there (it came out later she wasn’t and done the whole crazy routine so she could collect SSI and get housing faster) who used to go around telling people that she was Nicki Minaj and that the real one stolen her identity. One day, unbeknownst to the police officer sitting at the desk, she calls 911 and tells the operator that a police officer is being assaulted really bad. Naturally when 911 gets these types of calls, they send EVERYBODY to the scene-it’s an all hands on deck situation. Next thing you know, about a fleet of at least 50–60 cop cars swarm all around the homeless shelter with guns drawn, scaring the s–t out of everyone. Even the officer at the desk’s heart just stopped and he jumped to the ground. They were about to light that b—h real quick. Slowly the officer approaches the door and lets the officers in and asks them what the hell is going on. They told them that they received a 911 call that an officer here was being beaten and his jaw just dropped. He told them that nobody was beaten here and nobody called 911 here and he was completely dumbfounded. He didn’t know this lady called from a cell phone. He was going around asking if anyone placed this 911 call when finally the crazy lady spoke up and told them she was the one that called. The reason why she called was to report to them that ‘Nicki Minaj stolen my identity and I would like to file a police report.’ All of the police officer’s including the one that was moonlighting at the shelter’s jaws just dropped. All of them were pissed the hell off that they nearly shot the place up over a false 911 call. Oh, they took her a– right to jail for that. That was the weirdest 911 call I ever heard of.” We all remember the epic craze that happened worldwide when Pokémon Go was released in the summer of 2016. While there were plenty of stories involving people breaking the law for such things as trespassing or even crashing into a police car while playing the game, one dedicated player actually thought someone stealing her Pokémon was a legitimate reason to call 911. Only a day after the game was launched in the UK, a girl, who is clearly crying on the phone, starts blubbering about how, “he stole it again, he stole my Pokémon.” Clearly agitated, the operator responds, “Right… why is that a 999 (UK’s version of 911) call?” And the girl actually has the audacity to respond, “Because it’s really bad, like he took my Pikachu.” Before she can even finish stammering this bs into the line, the operator chastises her by saying, “You do realize that you’re f–king someone with a life or death emergency about a Pokémon…” But, but it’s Pikachu!! “Some extremely weird 9-1-1 calls I received: A drunken man called to say he had become entangled in a fish net and couldn’t escape. When officers responded, there was no net, and the man had passed out. A man called to say an invisible person had broken into his home and written a note in Spanish. He wanted me to send an officer who understood Spanish to translate it. It turned out there was no note, and presumably no invisible person. A woman called for an ambulance because she said she couldn’t control her hands. Another woman called to say she needed an ambulance because she had gotten a colonoscopy that morning, and believed that the doctor left the camera in her.” A man in England actually called 999 (their version of 911) to complain about a prostitute’s looks after meeting her. During the call he said, “I’ve arranged a meeting with her, but beforehand I’ve asked her for an honest description, otherwise when I get there I’m not going to use her services… Basically she has misdescribed herself, misrepresented herself totally…. She was angry because she obviously thinks I owe her a living or something.” Taking it a whole crazy step further, we was trying to use the law to get her in trouble, claiming that she was breaching the Sales of Goods Act. The aforementioned law stipulates that goods which are sold must be of satisfactory quality and match the seller’s description. The stunned operator on the phone tried to tell Mr. McStupid that in fact, he was the one committing illegal acts, ya know, trying to solicit sex and all. The whole insane ordeal ended with the man getting a warning letter about wasting police time. “Prior to becoming a sworn officer I spent a few months working dispatch. This was about 13 years ago and I recall it as if it were yesterday. It was the call that, even in it’s simplicity, made me realize I knew nothing about the world I was entering. Call comes in, there’s an individual lying in the middle of the street in front of XYZ Liquor Store. After I get off the phone I look over at my supervisor. She sees the befuddled expression on my face and asks what’s wrong. I tell her about the call to which she replies, ‘Oh that’s just Jones.’ I ask how she knows. She proceeds to tell me that this guy will walk 2 miles to the liquor store, buy a few things and then lie in the road. When someone stops to check on him, he will ask them for a ride home. I still remember how amazed I was by this. Over the years I worked in that department I ended up dealing with Jones on many occasions. When I would tell him to get out of the street he’d always ask me for a ride home, too.” “Weird emergency calls I have received working for the police: 1) There are a bunch of seagulls fighting with each other on the promenade. Please stop them before there is more trouble. 2) My daughter wears too much make up- could you please send an officer to stop her. 3) I want to move to Alaska and hunt and fish for my own food and live off the land -I will need something to fight bears with- will it be ok if I take a knuckleduster and a knife with me on the plane?” Apparently the West Midlands Police in England get so many weird, ridiculous 999 (aka 911) calls that they actually have to charge people abusing the emergency line. One such case? A grown a– woman actually contacted police while arguing with the owner of an ice cream truck. The atrocious crime? How he was putting sprinkles on her ice cream cone. I kid you not, this woman actually told the operator that, “It doesn’t seem like much of an emergency, but it is a little bit.” Apparently this criminal of an ice cream man was only putting her “bits,” or sprinkles, on one side of the cone and not on the other. When she complained, he refused to add more or to refund this poor victims money. Hey, don’t mess with a woman’s sprinkles! “My mother’s cousin was the town drunk. Everyone knew him and expected to see him with his companion can of beer, at all times. Once, after a multi-day bender, he realized he had run out of beer. He had lost his license to drive many months before (DUI, open container), and his vehicle had not been released from impound. Saturday evening, no beer, and since it was Massachusetts before there was Sunday liquor store sales, it meant being dry through Monday morning. He called 911 and asked for a ride to the liquor store! It was an emergency!” “This was told to me by a former dispatcher, who swears it is true: Caller (elder lady): I want to report public obscenity and profanity. 911: What is the location, ma’am? Caller: Just below my 2nd floor apartment windows, on the sidewalk. The address is … 911: And what is the nature of the disturbance, exactly? Caller: It’s a man, and he is whistling dirty songs. 911: A moment of silence. Then laughter. ‘I’ll have someone look into it, ma’am. Thanks for calling.'” “Caller: Who is this? Operator: This is the ambulance emergency line, do you have an emergency? Caller: I…I need a ‘Bambulance.’ Operator: Who is this? Caller: Joe. Operator: Ok…so where do you need it? Caller: I’m in a mutha f–kin phone booth. Operator: Ok, what’s the address there? Caller: (silence) Hold on… Operator: Ok sir, did you call through 911? Caller: Uh…no. Operator: Ok Joe, I need a location. What street are you on? Caller: Uh, I’m in the mutha f–kin’ phone booth at the Stop & Go. I’m at the…that’s it! I’m at the mutha f–kin’ Stop & Go. On the…wait a minute…what’s the mutha f–kin’ street? Corvel and sumthin’. At the mutha f–kin’ Stop & Go. Operator: Corvel and what? Caller: (silence) Hold on. Operator: (waiting) Joe! Caller: Uh huh? Let me see…coffee. Coffee. Operator: Caffee? Caller: There ya go. There ya go. I’m in the mutha f–kin’ phone booth. Let me tell ya what. I’m at the…I’m goin’ down the mutha f–kin’ road . Drivin’ my car, mindin’ my own G-DDAMN bizness. And a mutha f–kin’ deer jumps out and hit my car. Operator: Ok sir, are you injured? Caller: N-now let me tell ya. I get out and pick the mutha f–kin’ deer up. I thought her was DEAD. I put the mutha f–kin’ deer in my back seat, and I’m drivin’ down the mutha f–kin’ road and mindin’ my own bidness. The mutha f–ka woke up and bit me in the back a my g–damn neck. It bit me and done kicked the s–t outta my car. I’m in the mutha f–kin’ phone booth. The deer bit me in the neck. A big mutha f–kin’ DOG came up and bit me in the leg. I hit him with the mutha f–kin’ tire iron. And I stabbed him, I stabbed him with ma knife. So I got a hurt leg and the mutha f–kin’ deer…bit me in the neck. And the deer…and the dog won’t let me outta the mutha f–kin’ phone booth. Cuz he wants the deer. Now who gets the deer? Me or the dog? Operator: Ok sir, are you injured? Joe: YEAH I’m…a mutha f–kin’ deer bit me in the neck! Hold on…the mutha f–kin’ dog is bitin’ me. Hold on…g-ddamn, git outta…the mutha f–kin’ dog is bitin’ my a–. Operator: ….”It Isn’t The Movies.
What An Idiot.
Soooooo Loud!
Goat-Man.
Too Cute.
Stolen Identity.
Gotta Catch Them All!
Don’t Do Drugs…
You’re The One Actually Breaking The Law…
Ol’ Jones.
These Are Not Emergencies…
We All Scream For Ice Cream.
Beer Run.
Dirty Songs.
He Needs A Bambulance!
