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.
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 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…
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.
My wife and I were out DoorDashing when we still did, and this car in front of us at a green light stopped suddenly and the driver side door of that car flung open and a guy fell out into the street. We pulled up just ahead of him so we could watch at a safe distance and flagged other cars on the way to be cautious. I dialed 911 and asked for an ambulance because I thought the guy was having a heart attack. Cops and ambulance show up after some other drivers pulled cones out of their car to cordon off the area. Dude springs up, looks around confused and wild eyed, just starts punching the cops until he’s brought back down to the ground and handcuffed. I felt bad, as it turns out he was high out of his mind on something. I never like calling 911 for obvious reasons, cuz oink and ew, but I just hope the guys gets help. That was the first time. The second and only other time was because a guy who lives in our neighborhood found out his girlfriend cheated on him with one of their mutual friends, who was there this night, got drunk and started to confront him. Then shots were fired and from peeking out the door I saw a lady running with her baby in her arms and screamed “Get that gun away from him!” We called to say shots were fired and the whole mess, only to never have anyone show up. Only thing I know that happened in the next couple weeks as to why it was so quiet lately was that half the people on that side of the apartment complex were evicted. Seems to be a matter of other reasons butl, either way, intense few minutes to say the least.
A year or so before my mom passed, she started having some kind of episode in the middle of a conversation that was like that time in Star Trek where the crew started speaking gibberish, but couldn’t understand why nobody understood them. That was my only frame of reference and the paramedics who showed up understood immediately what was happening even if the operator on the phone didn’t.
First time at 8…when my drunk ass neighbour jumped from his 10m high roof and landed on his patio.
Ended with a Helicopter and everything, he actually survived.
Second time was when I was already an EMT to call for backup.
Last time was on Monday to,well, call for backup as an paramedic as radio reception was shit.
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.
It’s possible the driver was falling asleep. I drive all over for work and I’ve been there. I pull over these days.
I also, over 20 years ago when I was an idiot kid, used to drive drunk.
I was a far greater danger exhausted than drunk.
Huh. I hadn’t thought about that. Yeah, maybe it wasn’t drunk driving. Maybe it was sleep-deprivated driving. I guess we’ll never know.
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.
Son was going through a rough patch and was doing some drugs, came home and started to OD on some synthetic weed. Called 911 and asked for an ambulance, they only sent the police and arrested him even though I said no and to leave my house. It fucked my kid up being 17 at the time and has had a record because of it. I’ll never call 911 again.
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…
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 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.
Called about a car accident that I was in to get a police report and operator asked if I was hurt. I said I wasn’t and they asked me why else was I calling. Soo I just ended the call and went to go fuck myself.
This varies by state, but where I am if no one’s hurt and the cars are driveable, it’s considered a “non-reportable accident”
Generally speaking, we’ll still send cops to take a report if you really want one but it’s not really necessary for anything. Mostly it’s only needed if you’re it a company vehicle or something and your employer wants it for your file or something.
Otherwise, you just exchange info and let your insurance companies sort it out, the police don’t really have anything else to do with it at that point.
I believe some areas and departments have an online form you can fill out to generate a crash report.
If the police are very busy, they may tell you to just exchange info, do the online report, or go to the station later to file one, otherwise you might have to sit out on the side of the road for sometimes several hours waiting for an officer while they deal with higher priority incidents.
If there are injuries, or if the cars aren’t driveable, that does require a police report and will have a higher priority response because of it.
Again, that varies a lot from one state to another, I’m only speaking about the situation where I work.
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.
