Jeez. I thought they might be interested to hear about my sex life, but apparently they get really touchy if you just call them up to chat.
This piece is based on a Quora Question and an AskReddit thread. Links on the last page.
1/19. I got a 911 call from a female claiming her husband was having chest pains.The ambulance rushed to the scene. It ended up being a mentally unstable man chasing the woman (and now the paramedics) around 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 claiming 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 had 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. Thankfully, he had barely broken the skin because the blade was so dull. He’s fine now. He brought us cookies last weekend.
-Farah Rogers
2/19. I had a guy call asking if it was legal for him to shoot his neighbor because the guy’s hedges were hanging over his property and he considered it trespassing.
Another woman called me one time because her power went out, and she “didn’t know what to do with all her steaks.”
-[deleted]
3/19. On the day in 1979 that Skylab (Americas first space station) crashed to earth, I was sent on an emergency call to a residence because a piece of the spacecraft had crashed in some guys 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. (continued…)
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It was a broken glow 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 recognise 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.
-Rick Bruno
4/19. 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?
Caller: …
-Shawn Kobb
5/19. 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. (continued…)
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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 two 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.
-Jeremy Weiss
6/19. Years ago when I was a new dispatcher in Texas, 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 okay… 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.
-Janice Lampkin
7/19. I was a 911 dispatcher for just under a year, and I realized that it is NOT for me. A lot of respect for those people! This was in Gilbert, Arizona. If you’ve ever been there… This won’t surprise you. (continued…)
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The call came in from an elderly woman because there was a Black guy” at the park. I asked her what he was doing she said “Nothing, he’s just sitting there.” So I asked her what the problem was. Her response was “he shouldn’t be there”. I almost sent the cops to her place to pick her up as a mentally unstable person.
-Banjoe86
8/19. One woman called sobbing because a snow plow filled in the end of her driveway that she just shovelled. 911 is not your boyfriend, maam.
-mayaseye
9/19. When I was a kid I called 911 and yelled: “NAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHSYYBENNNYAHHHHHHHHHH BADAGEESEEEEBABAOOOOHHHHHHHH! into the phone.
The Lion King had just come out and I thought it was hilarious. After the third or fourth time, they sent a police officer to the house and he gave me a stern talking to. My mom was pretty embarrassed.
-way_fairer
10/19. One time, a man 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.
-Andrea Chaput
11/19. One guy called FRANTICALLY saying that he saw the dead body of a young woman, early 20s, wearing nothing but shorts. He gave a detailed description, hair color, skin color, body position, the whole bit.
He said the body was by the side of the interstate (in the middle of an affluent suburban area at rush hour) so we figured this had to be a really fresh crime scene. We started scrambling together officers to get there ASAP, a big hassle considering it’s rush hour and they’re all dealing with accidents and stuff like that.
On top of that, we can’t say what the issue is on the radio is because we have too many busybodies who monitor police radio, then call us to try to get juicy details, or othewise meddle. So we have to get these officers to their cars to read the computer, leaving other crime scenes, etc. And these are suburban cops in the Midwest, a murder is a damn big deal. (Continued…)
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The guy calls back a few minutes later. “Uh, I checked again, it’s a dead deer.”
Peeved, I announce on the radio that the trip is cancelled, “it was a deer”. An officer sarcastically calls back: “With shorts on?”
-fludru
12/19. A man called to tell me that his house was infested with “hundreds of ant-sized dogs.”
-mayaseye
13/19. We had a call for a guy with a toothache. At 3AM. On a Saturday. The guy stated that he’d been hurting for about three weeks, and no it wasn’t getting any worse. He was insisting on going to the hospital no matter how much we discouraged him.
Then he keeled over and went into cardiac arrest. So good thing he maid that stupid call, actually.
-das_thorn
14/19. They call me for all sorts of insane reasons that are totally inappropriate:
To ask for directions.
To ask if they can legally own a monkey. (No, for real.)
To say they called earlier and the girl they talked to wasn’t very helpful (dude, it’s still me).
To ask why we haven’t gotten there yet to unlock their car and can we please hurry up?
To say they think someone messed with their a/c but they don’t want to file a report or talk to anyone about it.
They heard a weird noise/saw a weird car/a suspicious person/something they thought was strange 30 minutes ago.
And so on and so forth.
-scoopi
15/19. I was a 911 dispatcher in a small rural county for about 2 years. After some training I was finally taking calls and the very first 911 call that came in was from a middle-aged man who was driving with his elderly mother.
They got into a rather unusual predicament. (continued…)
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He had stopped to get gas or something and accidentally locked his keys in the car with his mother still in there. Incredibly, his mother couldn’t figure out how to get out of the locked car.
I’m all, “Ok sir, can you ask her to open the door?”, and he’s all “I’m trying to get her to unlock the door but I don’t think she understands what I’m saying.”
I’m at a loss for words as this wasn’t the emergency I was expecting first day on the job. Meanwhile, I’m looking to my supervisor for some assistance and she is laughing so hard she can’t help. They eventually figured it out between themselves – thank god, because I don’t think I was mentally prepared to talk them through it.
-Hacklebarney
16/19. I had a woman call because her “baby” wasn’t breathing, so we gave her instructions to do CPR. Medics got there and found her doing CPR on her dog.
-arjayim
17/19. Had a guy one time call in screaming that the Devil wasn’t leaving his soup. He then exclaimed, “I’m gonna to kill him if you lizard people don’t get him out!” So that guy was high on meth.
Spoiler alert: there were in fact no devils in the soup.
-johnnyhorse
18/19. Had a woman call saying her cat was stuck in a tree. I just knew she wanted the fire department to come save the cat, so I got my “that only happens in movies speech ready. Then she said “…so my husband climbed up to get the cat and now he’s stuck too.”
The plot thickens.
-arjayim
19/19. One of my personal favorites was someone who called and said this:
“I know this is not an emergency, but there is a person in a giant monkey suit running down the road humping all the fire hydrants”
I had to hold back my laughing as best I could. But it turns out he was right! When I sent the police, there there was a kid in a monkey costume humping every hydrant he came across.
-Beer_
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