First rule this New Year’s Eve: Don’t do anything dumb.
Don’t make new friends at the bar. Don’t go to a party. Don’t get drunk and accidentally sleep with your spouse’s best friend again.
Alas, experience tells us that dumb just comes naturally to some people.
Exhibit A: The Vancouver Island man who called 9-1-1 to complain that his food-delivery guy hadn’t shown up.
For real.
That episode took first place in B.C.’s brand-new list of top 10 reasons not to phone the emergency number.
E-Comm, which handles 99 per cent of the province’s 9-1-1 calls, issues the list each year as a reminder not to tie up its operators with non-emergencies.
Others that made the 2020 top 10 reasons not to call:
- Enquiring if there is a full lockdown for COVID-19
- Wondering if having a trampoline is illegal during COVID-19
- Asking for assistance to apply for CERB
- Complaining that a mattress purchased second hand was more soiled than advertised
- Reporting that a bank card was stuck in the ATM
- Reporting a neighbour for smoking in a non-smoking building
- Enquiring about how to enter a career in law enforcement
- Confirming the time
- Asking for help because they were locked out of their car
The list is one of those funny/not funny things. Megan McMath sure wasn’t laughing this summer when she picked up the phone at Saanich’s Vancouver Island Emergency Call Centre, which handles all 911 calls south of Nanaimo, and got the man complaining about the missing food delivery.
“Calling 911 to ask a question or report a consumer complaint may seem harmless enough,” McMath said. “But what people may not realize is that we need to treat every call as an emergency until we can determine otherwise.”
Call-takers have to determine if the caller is in danger, is trying to pass on a coded message. That takes time. Meanwhile, other people are phoning in with real emergencies.
No, McMath doesn’t know what Mr. Missing Food ordered. Once she determined that his emergency didn’t involve anything more than a rumbling stomach, she moved on. “I didn’t stay on the call that long.”
This is not the first time outraged would-be diners have called the emergency line, though. West Shore RCMP once had a caller who demanded they bring him turkey supper.
In 2016, Victoria police felt compelled to tweet “Please don’t call 9-1-1 if your McDonald’s order is incorrect” after someone did just that, phoning from the downtown Douglas Street restaurant. (Alcohol might have been involved.) McDonald’s also figured in another of VicPD’s all-time favourites, someone complaining that the fast-food eatery “forgot to take the pickles off the hamburger.”
Also recorded by VicPD over the years were these beauties:
“Did we just have an earthquake? When can we expect the aftershock?”
“There are a whole bunch of police cars with lights in the neighbourhood. Can they turn them off? My dog has a heart condition.”
“Peacocks have escaped from Beacon Hill Park.”
“What’s the date?”
“My cat has his head stuck between the wooden rungs on my dining room chair and he can’t get out.” In that last case, the dispatcher advised the caller to break the rungs.
There was also this classic in 2014: “I’m in the mall parking lot. Boxing Day sale traffic is nuts. I’ve only moved three car lengths in 20 minutes. Come and do something.”
The old Saanich 911 centre had its own collection: Someone reporting an American bullfrog in his backyard, a woman who said a deer was on her lawn “staring at me” though the window, and a business owner who dreamed about a burglary and wanted police to swing by the store to see if it was real. A woman who had been handcuffed during a sexual encounter phoned to say her boyfriend had passed out drunk and she couldn’t find the key.
Anyway, don’t do anything tonight that you’ll regret tomorrow.
As social media notes, this New Year’s really does mean that hindsight is 2020.
