20 911 Dispatchers Reveal The Dumbest Calls They’ve Ever Gotten And It’ll Make You Question Humanity
Found on Ask Reddit
1.
A lady ran over herself with her own car. She called to let us know she was okay.
This was fall of 2012. Hope she’s uh, still doing okay.
2.
Middle of night shift, get a Report of a guy trying to ride on a moose. Officer attends, there is indeed a male trying to ride said moose. Male is wearing a high vis vest and a helmet, which his girlfriend made him put on, for safety reasons, of course.
3.
Some lady wanted the fire department to come burn her house down because she thought a demon lived in it. I sent paramedics and police to check on her but I told her we’d be happy to burn her house down in a controlled training capacity if she wanted to donate it, but there was a lot of paperwork to get that started.
— jdkon
4.
1) Every Thanksgiving you’ll always get the person who calls because they don’t know how long to cook a turkey. Never fails.
2) Every Thanksgiving someone always puts a frozen turkey in a deep fryer – usually in a trailer home – and a fire “surprisingly” occurs.
3) People who have warrants on themselves love calling to complain and ask to see the police in person for a dispute. They don’t seem to remember we look up everyone in the dispute not just the accused.
5.
My mom was a dispatcher in Arizona after college back in the 70s, and told me a great story about a call she got, or rather a series of calls from an Indian man (India Indian, not Native American). I can’t recall what the original distress call was about, but after that first call, he started calling back all the time because he thought she had a sexy voice. She told me he would turn the charm level up to 11, trying to woo her in his thick Indian accent. Apparently as soon as she would answer the call, his opening line was “Hello control, I looove you!” and she’d have to hold back her laughter.
6.
Got a call from a woman in the wee hours of the morning, clearly drunk and slurring.
.
She says : “I wan shu to send an ocifer to mah housh and takh me to the bar, wait while ah git drunk, an then takh me home.”
.
Me: “Ma’am I think you are looking for a taxi service.”
.
Her: Well you guys shushpended mah license!”
.
Time passes…
.
Her: “Okay! Ah’m ready! Come n’ git me!”
.
Me: Ma’am, I already told you, we are not a taxi…”
.
Her: “AH GOTS WARRANTS!”
.
Me: “Oh, well in that case…”
.
They said she fought like a prizefighter.
— Dalivus
7.
“I’m super drunk and i got run over by a sled” now is northern Alberta typically this would mean a snow mobile and potentially life threatening injuries. No, no. His kid hit his ankle bone with a wooden toboggan. Didn’t even have a bruise.
8.
Around 3am
Me: *** county 911, do you need police, fire, or medical? Caller: nope. I’m calling to report there is no emergency. Me: … ok, you don’t need any assistance? Caller: no sir, everything is good here. Me: ok, well you called an emergen… Caller: click
Well I guess I’ll go fuck myself then, thanks bud.
9.
Once my dad got a call from the 911 dispatch. At first he was really confused because he didn’t call them in the first place. They asked
“Sir do you have a daughter?”
“Yes.. Why?”
“Well she just called and claimed you broke her heart!”
Apparently my sister got in trouble when she was about 5 or 6 and called 911 claiming “My daddy broke my heart.” She hung up in embarrassment after the dispatcher began laughing.
— jonatna
10.
me: 911 whats your emergency? Caller: there is a horse laying down in a field. me: do you believe it is injured? Caller: no it just normally stands up. me: yeah, we will have a deputy go look at it.
And Yes the horse was okay
— Mav034
11.
Yesterday morning was a cold one in my area. Icy conditions on the roads, widespread crashes, all the good stuff… Lady calls in and complains about a suspicious substance on the road that made her car slip. She was driving too fast to see what it was but insisted that something strange was afoot.
12.
I’ve been a dispatcher for about 7 years now in a medium size county in Florida.
- Every year on July 4th and New Years we get calls about gunshots. Every single time the caller is perfectly convinced they’re gunshots and couldn’t possibly be fireworks. They’ll say they hear automatic weapons, or my personal favorite “rapid fire shotguns”. And every single time a deputy goes out to investigate, it turns out to be the unlikely culprit of fireworks.
- I had one woman call 911 to tell me she found a cell phone on the ground. That’s it.
- Irate elderly male calls 911 while standing in the Sheriff’s Office lobby to report the clerk not being helpful. When I told him that’s not something you use a 911 line for, he went ape shit, going as far as threatening to break into the office and shoot me. He was subsequently arrested.
- Male was arrested for domestic battery, called 911 from the backseat of the patrol car and stated he was being unlawfully imprisoned. When I told him the only thing I could do for him was to send him more deputies, he said “…no thanks” and hung up. He then proceeded to call three more times looking for a different answer. We told the deputies on scene, they took his phone away and added a charge of misuse of 911.
- Had a woman call in stating she accidentally took too much melatonin. She started getting hysterical when she felt the effects of her overdose. She was getting sleepy.
13.
Too many to count. If I had to pick a favorite I’d have to choose the time a concerned citizen called in an animal stuck in a tree. That animal…was a bird.
— emon3yy
14.
Kind of relevant, worked in the Coast Guard where one of my jobs was the same thing as a dispatcher with radios and phones and boats instead of cars to respond. One day some one called me to tell me their young daughter was just kidnapped. I asked them if the kidnapper was on a boat or near the water, they said no. The caller just didn’t think it was a big enough issue to call 911 so they called the Coast Guard instead.
15.
We have a call that every new trainee at my county listens to during training, because it highlights how completely oblivious our callers can truly be. A neighbor enters her friend’s house because she’s not answering the door. She finds the patient on the couch sleeping. She calls 911 because she’s not waking up. She says “She’s not moving, not answering me or waking up. It looks like she has been cooking with blue berries, her hands are all blue.” Operator already knows that means she’s dead. We send everyone out, EMS arrives on scene first and immediately backs out. According to the deputy that arrived right after, she had a gun in hand, shot herself in the head and it splattered ALL over the wall behind her. Our caller never even noticed.
16.
My husband used to dispatch before he was old enough to go to the police academy. We lived in a small town, ranked 3rd most dangerous in our state. Lots and lots of drug use. There was a woman who was honestly crazy. I don’t know if she had mental problems before the drugs or if the drugs fried her brain but she was a regular caller. Some of her calls- she called and said that she was raped. After coaxing some info out of her she said she knew who did it. It was her stuffed bear . Another time she called to report a break in because she fell asleep with her blanket wrapped around her but when she woke up it was bundled at her feet. She called one summer night (routinely got over 115 degrees in the summer) and said that she had walked 3 Miles from her apartment and needed a ride back because she was barefoot and her feet hurt. He asked her where her shoes were and she said she was carrying them. She walked 3 miles and didn’t think to put them on.
Another call wasn’t stupid but still stuck with me. It was a domestic violence call and when he asked what was going on the woman yelled “he threw a piping hot chicken pot pie at me!” Something about her attention to detail I just thought was funny in an unfunny situation
17.
3 am. Got a call about a suspicious vehicle outside of her house. I start getting the description and get my officers en route when she says “They’re leaving!” I get the direction they are headed and relay it; I’ve got 4 officers converging like a net on this guy.
Now that I’ve got a moment I ask the woman: “What exactly did they do?”
She replies: “They just stopped at the stop sign for a moment and then they moved on….”
— Dalivus
18.
Not a dispatcher, but the caller.
When I was 4-5 years old, we had just learned about calling 911 at school. Naturally, I was unfamiliar with what crime truly was so my concern was “now I can call 911 on my big sister when she bothers me”. On this day she’s being a bitch as usual so I go to another room and call the police and say “my sister is bullying me”. I can’t tell the dispatcher any satisfactory info on where we are. My sister comes over and gets the phone. I don’t remember what happened with that. One way or another, they find our house and the policeman who came gives my sister a stern talking to. Now whenever she remembers that day she hangs it over me with all the cringe she can inflict upon me, having clearly learned nothing.
19.
Not a dispatcher but i have a story about a dumb 911 call.
My ex’s mom wouldn’t buy him mcdonalds. The guy is 15. His mom said “no there’s food at home,” so being an adult he calls 911. Then he’s ashamed of calling 911 so doesn’t say anything. One of his sisters is screaming at him for being an idiot and the other is laughing hysterically.
His mom had to get on the phone and explain she raised a bratty kid who throws tantrums when he’s told no.
20.
A man called 911 on himself because he was driving drunk so he pulled over and waited for the police to get there. They got there and offered him a ride home (he’s still getting charged) but he insisted that they take him down to county. He really wanted to go to jail so he did lol.
Another time, I picked up the phone the caller says something about spires in her lungs. It was really hard to understand her, she had a heavy lisp and just didn’t talk right. I’m thinking maybe she recently had some sort of surgical operation on her lungs and she needs medical assistance, maybe some sort of stent or something? I didn’t fucking know. After clarifying with her I found out she was talking about the spiders in her lungs. She went on to say that a demented goat just ate her dog and spat it out as a demon in her front yard and something about the CIA, and that’s when I realized she was bat-shit insane.
Generally speaking, most calls are actually pretty dumb. Especially when people cluster up the 911 lines with calls that aren’t emergencies. Please learn your local police and fire department’s non-emergency dispatch number. There’s a good chance the dispatch center might not even be in your city, but it should be able to be found with a few Googles.
“911, what’s the address of your emergency?”
“Well this isn’t an emergency but-”
“Then stop talking, call this number instead — — —- ”
has to be one of the most frequent interactions between dispatchers and callers.
— zacht180