Most of us know that you should only ever ring emergency services in the case of, well, an emergency, being mindful of potentially blocking more urgent calls.
However, it would appear that some people didn’t get the memo on this one, calling 911 operators for reasons as petty as losing a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos or because they wanted to know ‘how to cook turkeys at Thanksgiving.’
A fascinating yet shocking Reddit thread has prompted 911 operators to come forward with the ‘pettiest reason’ for a call they’ve ever had to deal with. Honestly, I’ve had to read some of the answers a few times to make sure I didn’t misread…
A surprising amount of calls were food/’hangry’ related. One operator revealed how a caller once rang up to request ‘the number for Domino’s Pizza,’ while another remembered a woman ‘who just got out of church and the drive thru to KFC was too long… and she wanted an officer to come out and help.’
A third dispatcher recalled:
A very pregnant lady called 911 because the restaurant she ordered from got her order wrong and wouldn’t refund her. She sobbed to me about how she’s pregnant and she just wanted this certain dish. She threw the order of food at the worker, who placed his own 911 call for assault. That probably didn’t work out in her favor.
Some of the reported calls were downright bizarre, with one woman ringing up ‘because her neighbors chihuahuas were having sex and she thought that was disgusting.’
Meanwhile, another wrote:
I received a call on the non emergency line from a 90-something year old lady asking me what lamp she should put in her bedroom. I told her I did not understand and that the sheriff’s office was not the correct place to ask.
Eventually she got upset and said ‘Fine I’ll call 911, they’ll help me there!’ I tried to tell her that 911 would just go back to me and it was a misuse of an emergency line, but it was too late.
15 seconds later 911 rings, I answer and lo and behold it was the lady asking ‘what lamp should I get for my bedroom?’
Of course, as entertaining as such threads are to read, calling 911 for trivial matters wastes precious time and resources, and the majority of the queries here could really be solved with a quick Google search and a lie-down.