Calling 911

[Kathryn Merteuil]

I have a couple times, I can remember a looooong time ago when I lived in an apartment. We had a neighbor who was having some kind of "episode", she was screaming in pain and nobody could seem to help her. There were a few of us in the apartment trying to figure out what we could do, but nothing was helping. We turned it over to the professionals at that point. It was something related to a condition she had. They sent a firetruck and an ambulance both that night.

Another was when I witnessed a car accident, I was actually too freaked out to be much help because the truck that crashed into a car barely missed me to completely take out that other vehicle. The operator was like if it's at such and such we are on it. I was like. yea, that's it.

 

[flyingdumbo127]

I have called twice years ago, when my beloved late elderly Grandma had fallen.

 

[bcla]

Sure. But it’s been different over the years with mobile phones. The really disconcerting thing was when the 911 operator was patched through with the police or fire dispatcher and I could hear it and tried talking even though I was muted. It been for various things, some bigger emergencies than others. I think the neighborhood fire was clearly an emergency, but at other times I had no means to look up a nonemergency number. Especially with a pay phone.

I go way back to when emergencies meant dialing 0 for a phone company operator.