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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't sound right. I don't know as much about other cities but if you call 911 in Manhattan you're going to be connected to a call center at Metrotech in Brooklyn, a few blocks from where I am typing this, where a real live human who is almost certainly from NYC and lives here will answer your call, determine the precinct and sector and get the job to dispatch.

If someone is asking clarifying details it's likely because they are trained to do so, as people in real life emergencies tend to get flustered and make mistakes.

The 911 system in NYC is sophisticated, was revamped by the Bloomberg administration heavily in the wake of September 11th, and is very much part of the civil service here. Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction and makes me doubt the rest of your stories as a result.

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> If someone is asking clarifying details it's likely because they are trained to do so, as people in real life emergencies tend to get flustered and make mistakes.

As an anecdote, I was once dispatched to an unconscious elderly female with a head injury after a 10' fall. This is obviously a fairly serious, time critical situation.

We arrived at the dispatched address, and found a man who was seriously confused as to why an ambulance crew was pounding on his door.

Turns out, the call was actually on the opposite end of our response area. The woman had been found on the ground by a delivery driver, and in his excitement, he pulled out his clipboard and mistakenly read the address of his last delivery.

Obviously the call taker would have no way of knowing that, and accurately dispatched us to the address that was reported. It just goes to show how easy it is for someone calling 911 to make a mistake, and how critical it is for call takers to do as much as they can to verify the location of the incident.

> Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction

You sound very sure of yourself, but telephony is pretty damn complex and there are lots of strange things that happen in telephone call routing. Maybe if that guy has a cell number from another city or a foreign country, or with a certain carrier that doesn't comply with all the requirements of E911, or there are obscure bugs in the routing system, it'll get routed to a non-NYC call center. Are you sure that never happens?

In San Francisco, if you dial 911 on a cell phone you get the CHP, not San Francisco police. Adds delay to the help getting there.

There is real number you can dial instead, which I've stored in my phone and allows me to dial the SF 911 center directly.

Luckily I haven't needed it for more than a brush fire. This might be true in other states as well.

In SF when you dial 911 it is a good solid five minutes before anyone picks up because there is first the TTY modem handshake and then a recorded message in English, Spanish, more than one kind of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and on and on.

Kind of amazing you can't make an account on 911.com, register your cell phone and home phone #s and put in your preferred language, allergies to medicines, serious illnesses etc and have all that come up to the dispatcher when you call....

But I also worked in that industry for a while and thats not going to happen anytime soon by the looks of it

> The 911 system in NYC is sophisticated, was revamped by the Bloomberg administration heavily in the wake of September 11th, and is very much part of the civil service here. Your story about calling 911 in NYC and getting an out of town call center is obvious fiction and makes me doubt the rest of your stories as a result.

I worked at a telco for 4 years, one of our "responsibilities" was to supply the government daily with "the 911 dump" which is a mapping of all phone numbers to physical addresses for reverse lookup.

From experience, I can tell you it would often go many weeks of script failures with nobody noticing, and in any given dumps there were hundreds of addresses that were wrong and incoherent. Telco is a numbers game. When you're dealing with millions of entries, a couple of percent are always garbage.

I never said I got an "out of town call center." I said the dispatcher was not a local. Obviously I couldn't tell you where the call center was (though another time I called, I was routed straight away to the NY State Police and I have no idea why).

As you may know, there is a law that New York City employees must be residents. However, I once lived in an apartment used by multiple firefighters as their residential address, but who did not actually live there. Rent in NYC is expensive, city employee salaries are not generally very high, and so people do cheat by paying a small amount of money for a place to use as a mailing address (or even sleep occasionally).

Another story from NYC 911: I called to report live exposed electrical wiring in a sidewalk shed on a busy street. The British call this a hoarding, and out-of-towners often don't know the term, but it's sufficiently well-known in NYC that the NY Times uses it in headlines: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/nyregion/the-sidewalk-shed...

The dispatcher had no idea what a "sidewalk shed" was. I explained what it was in some detail, after which the dispatcher still didn't get it, and thought I was talking about a shed like you'd have behind your house in the suburbs. This person may well have been working in Brooklyn, but surely hadn't lived there any length of time. Indeed the city employee residency law doesn't require any "warm up" period--you can move in any time within the first 90 days of your employment.

Live exposed wires is not an emergency. That's what 311 is for (or similar City Information and Reporting services.)

I have lived in NYC for 17 years and you are the first person I have heard use the term sidewalk shed.

Here it is used by the New York Times, described as "ubiquitous":

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/nyregion/the-sidewalk-shed...

The New York Times has lived in NYC for over 160 years.

Perhaps it is familiar to newspapers and people in public service? As a lifetime NYC resident, I'd like to add a data point: I am familiar with the sight, but I have never heard the term before.

When there was a fire in the coop building I was living in Brooklyn the first fire truck was there in minutes of the 911 call and a whole group of them was in under 10.

Not incorrect, although the revamped system has become pretty infamous for going down, leading lines to ring busy and overworked dispatchers to revert to pen and paper. The outages have been responsible for several deaths.

http://lubbockonline.com/stories/020299/LA0689.shtml#.V2_jIp...

The article you're linking to has a dateline of 1999.

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