Hacker News Reader

Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about the 911 call the article mentioned, if anyone else is, here's a transcript.

http://www.aintnowaytogo.com/911Call.htm

Admonishing someone for cursing in that situation is just nuts.

I once called 911 for a traffic accident and I also got flustered when they kept asking for my address (I wasn’t involved) instead of telling me that someone is on the way. Ali l wanted to hear is “we have sent somebody”. Then it would have been much easier to answer other questions.

The one and only time I made an emergency call, I was right around the corner from my home but I couldn't describe where I was. I wasn't in any way injured (I was helping an old woman who had fallen and cracked her head on the pavement), but the call and situation completely flustered me. Quite eye-opening.

> I also got flustered when they kept asking for my address (I wasn’t involved)

This is entirely reasonable.

1) Its a stressful situation

2) Your home address is irrelevant to the situation. But because they're asking, you assume they think its relevant[1]. So you're subconsciously worried that they are going to show up at your house because of the miscommunication.

3) You can't quite consciously put your finger on why you want them to stop thinking about your home address because its a stressful situation.

[1] See Grice's 3rd maxim https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html

I've sort of had the opposite experience. I made a 999 (UK) call for a traffic accident - head on collision, one person dead at the scene, another died later, devastating scene on a winter's night with just what car lights were left, a horn stuck blaring and quite a bit of smoke in the air.

I was at my home and heard it. Ran to a few hundred metres away and as I got there a nurse arrived too who by chance was driving that way. I made the call because I was pretty certain she'd handle the carnage better than I could.

They answered and I explained there had been a head on car crash, the next question was Police, Fire or Ambulance? Which threw me a bit, I don't care who you send that can deal with this! I think I said Ambulance and then they sent all three anyway.

They then asked what road I was on, it was a minor road and I couldn't remember the road name so I was trying to describe where it went from and to and how far along it was. The person answering the call seemed not to know the place names I was giving, my brain was working overtime trying to find references.

It wasn't until the next day that I realised I should've just given my home address and they'd have found us easily.

I had a similar experience when making a much less serious 999 call for a drunk dude we found passed out in the middle of a car park, it was only after I hung up that I noticed Google have some sort of feature which knew I was making a 999 call and was offering me information about my current location on screen - had no idea they did that though so didn't think to look at my phone screen...

Wow, kudos to Google, a great feature! They really should publicise that more though, I would have had no idea either.

> the next question was Police, Fire or Ambulance?

In the Netherlands I hade the same experience with my only call. I still get angry I had to make that decision. In fact I am pretty sure I got it wrong. In the end no one came and 4 hours later I got a call asking whether I still needed help.

Thank god things had calmed down at that point, but that was pretty much luck. Had I made the right choice between police, ambulance or firefighters, a lot less luck would have been needed.

In many cases when they’ve asked me that the next step was a quick transfer to the local police precinct dispatch or the local fire/medical dispatch. Dunnno what they do when they need to dispatch all of the above though...

Indeeed. It seems that here, the emergency number is just for dispatch.

I made a 911 call once about someone yelling "GET AWAY FROM ME SOMEBODY CALL THE POLICE" in an altercation across the street from my window. My address wasn't showing up properly in their database[1], so I started trying to say "they're homeless so the exact unit isn't necessary, let me give you cross streets" and she cut me off immediately with the most holier-than-thou delivery of "homeless people need help too".

....dude, _I_ called _you_. Obviously I'm on board with the idea that homeless people need help during emergencies just like anyone else. I get that dispatchers are people and people aren't perfect, and this lady's unprofessionalism didn't end up making much of a difference in this particular case, but I wonder how much gaps in training and competence bigger than these minor examples cost in terms of response time and lives.

[1] Which is pretty concerning if I ever have an emergency...

The emergency services operators in the UK make it very clear -- should the situation warrant immediate attention -- that someone _is_ on the way before they go on to ask more questions or suggest action to take as appropriate. I'm quite glad to have only had to experience that once, even thinking about it has raised my heart rate.

Non-emergency calls to the police will usually involve working out who you are at some point in the conversation; non-emergency calls to NHS24/NHS Direct will start off by taking contact details and triaging that you really are not an emergency case. If you drop off the line and they can't get back in touch with you, they've got enough information to make sure you're OK.

The transcript makes the article ridiculous. This issue had nothing to do with the trivial choice of words that the article talks about. The nurse was 100% wrong.

She asked to speak to the person who couldn't breathe!

It has all to do with choice of words, but of a son. He never told nurse that she can't breathe. She told here "she's having difficulty breathing" and then "No, you can't (talk with her). She seems like she's incoherent."

incoherent - (of spoken or written language) expressed in an incomprehensible or confusing way; unclear.

Only person here that is incoherent is son. "having difficulty breathing" means breathing but with difficulties. "incoherent" means talking but words does not make sense.

Someone in that moment of panic is not carefully choosing the words they're using and considering their dictionary meaning.

I'm a paramedic, not a calltaker, but if someone is described as "having difficulty breathing" and "incoherent", that warrants an EMS response. Start the rig and ask any other questions you have after that.

I'm not pedantic about word use, but if somebody uses random words they can't expect other person to understand. When nurse asks what is the problem and they respond "i don't know, how the hell should i know?!" Should nurse know? How?

What about panic attack? It can be described as shortness of breath (difficulty breathing) and sense of terror, impending death, loss of control (being incoherent). It's not life-threatening and does not warrant EMS response.

It makes the BBC article ridiculous, but not the academic article. Check it out; it's fascinating: https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/800591

>Myrick complained people drove by her home crying "Murderer, Murderer!"

Can we talk to these people? Give them a phone please. Why won’t they talk? If you continue your complaints, we have to hang up, ma’am. Bye bye.

Fucking hell, that made my blood boil.

The guy on the phone was totally right. What if it was that nurse's mother? Why the hell would they think standard protocol was to talk to someone who lay dying. It's nuts. The supervisor is nuts. The nurse was nuttier still.

That was from like 1984 or something?

Sometimes the worst things happening lead to positive outcomes later. That incident probably shook up the entire industry and an outcome is something like that won’t ever happen again.

Kind of like major engineering disasters teach us a ton of stuff and in the end, ironically, make the world a safer place from those lessons.

It's really messed up that for some people, politeness is more important that someone's life.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com