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?
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.
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
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.
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.
the power button emergency mode is soo useless to me, I’ve only ever accedentaly used it and i can’t turn it off on a Samsung device only change it from 112 to 911 to hopefully have it not call an emergency number in my country.
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!
Very good information to have. I will hopefully never have a reason to use it, but if i do? It’s Toynbee that saved my life ig lol. In this case tho, I had just finished brushing my teeth, so the tub just seemed the intuitively correct spot to curl up and cross those fingers. The tub wasnt made of anyrhing special, so had a stray been loosed my way, I may have had some very different content to bring to this thread.
And thanks. Im honestly surprised all 3 of us (not to mention the other neighbors and their pets) did. The unwelcome guest was the only to recieve injury in the exchange (besides the number of broken things and holes in walls ofc), but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared for my life during or psychologically unscathed by the event. Thank god for talk therapy
I was commissioning a new phone system for a customer and as part of the process we are required to test 000 or 112. Pretty easy, called the number gave then the approved speel of this is only a test call for a new phone system and asked them to tell me what number I was presenting.
Never had to call because of an actual problem.
I did that once when I was working at a small TV station as the local broadcast engineer. Phones were not my responsibility but there was no IT person at our location and they didn’t send anyone when they did a system upgrade, so I spent a couple late nights at the station dialed into a conference call on my BlackBerry since the Cisco phones weren’t going to work. I don’t know how many times I called 911 and got the Miami dispatch (I was 800 miles/1300 kilometers away from Miami).
Used to call them all the time as part of a job working university campus security. We knew them, they knew us, no big deal. We were briefed each year on how to talk to them, what order to give descriptions of people’s attire for example (top-down, inside-out), the specific phonetic alphabet they used, a map of campus with cardinal directions, all that stuff. Not a huge deal.
The conservatives were elected and with that comes their usual slew of social cuts. This time it was apparently cuts to caring for people with permanent brain trauma. I worked downtown a lot and seen this guy collapse at a bus stop and start convulsing on the ground. My first thought was “Why is this guy on the ground, why is he napping there?”. Props to the Indigenous girl that probably deals with this shit all the time back home with her traumatized elders; she looked me in the eye and told me to call 911, understanding I had no idea what was going on. So I did and the operator gave a scripted list of questions regarding the guys info which I didn’t know any of it. The paramedics came to get him and I left.
I seen the same guy collapse at another bus stop a few weeks later, and again couple days after that. Dude should have seriously still been in the hospital, but fascists do what fascists do. Ofc, maybe he just left the hospital on his own accord, but the elections had just finished a short while before and we had a new, right-wing, dumbass premier that hated poor people, especially poor, disabled people.
Can’t recall the first with certainty, but I think it was when I was driving in a heavy snowstorm on the highway and witnessed an 18-wheeler jackknife in the opposing lane, eventually coming to a rest in the divider. Since stopping was only going to put me in danger, I had it call it in and give the mile marker.
I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a medical emergency, but given the snowy conditions it wasn’t going to be fun for anyone involved.
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.
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.
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 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.
I was with my girlfriend and my grandfather had called and asked me to pick him up some Popeyes. I drive over there, grab his order and wait at a red light.
there was a woman who was walking with her hair in front of her face and a limp. told my gf “damn, kinda early to be high eh? its only 2pm” and chuckled.
the woman approached my car and knocked on my window. scared shitless, I crack the window just a tiny bit and say hello. she asked for help, throws her hair backwards and reveals blood all over her face… she was dripping blood everywhere, visual is burned in my memory forever… she couldn’t have been older than 16
she tells me that she got jumped for her phone by a group of kids, I tell her to get in the back of my car and I drive towards where she said she got jumped just in case I can find who jumped her while dialing 911. scary stuff…
Got to my late 30’s before needing to call. This was about 6 years ago. My mother in law was staying with us because her husband passed 3 months prior. She found out later that month she had pancreatic cancer. So my wifes family cleaned out their house and got things in order. She moved in with us maybe a month prior. My wifes sister was with me visiting to see her and my wife left like 30 min to take care of stuff. It was my sister’s daughter and my kid who was 3 or 4 at the time. It started out She said she was having trouble breathing and sat on our stairs as her sister tried to get her to calm down since at this point we didnt think much of it. Within a few more minutes she started to panic and so did the sister. The sister started screaming and I called 911. By the time they got here we had already saw her slip out of consciousness while continuing to say i can breath I dont want to die. Paramedics tried for 30 min or so and took her to the hospital were she was pronounced dead. It was a massive heart attack and everyone says there really wasn’t much we could have done. That was a bad year, but then we got covid the next year so it just keeps getting better…
