911 -- For The First Time of My Life

ps. Happy Lunar New Year's Eve!

by cAmilla Wu

City-- Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Location-- Hilton, Los Angeles Airport

 Time-- L.A. Time: 11:03pm / Taipei Time: 3:03pm

Date-- L.A.: January 24, 2009 / Taiwan: January 25, 2009

Temperature-- You can wear a T-shirt only and you won't get frozen to death staying outside.

    You won't believe what I have done a minute ago.

I just dialed 911 for the first time EVER of my life~

Geez!

    The thing is that I called the operator to open the line for me. And I've waited for almost 20 minutes. I thought they had the job done. I followed the procedure, dialed 9 and 1 to make a local call. Then I punched 1-800-xxx-xxx to get access to my prepaid phone card; however, I guess I was just a little bit "slow" pressing the button of 8(obviously, not slow enough), then it happened! Within less then a second, I had got a call back.

"Hi..." I was getting ready to file a complaint to the hotel staff.

A male voice came from the other side:

"Yes, Madam. How may we help you?"

"Oh... I was trying to make a phone call and I already asked one of your staff to open the line for me. I've waited at least more than 20 minutes. But it is still not working!"

"Ok. Madam. If you wanna make a local call. You just dial 9 and then 1, followed by the number you wish do dial. You don't call 911."

"What? Seriously? I did?"

"Yes, you did."

" Oh! I'm so sorry!!! I'm terribly sorry upon the trouble that I've caused!"

Is that a new year's gift for me? A call from PSAP(Public Safety Answering Point) ?

Pps. At least, it proves one thing that how efficient the operator of 911 is upon dealing with the emergency situation, according to my case. I'm still feeling sorry about the accident; however, on the other hand, I'm quite upset upon the efficiency of the hotel staff. Well, on the second thought, people make mistakes and we are human beings. Maybe the staff was in one of her blue days as well. At least, she did help me with the line the second time. And I was able to make a phone call within few seconds with the second help, although she uttered her words with a melancholy and reluctant sound. 

Ppps. For your information--

Dialing patterns

In particular, the choice of 9-1-1 as the emergency services number can cause dialing-pattern problems in some hotels and businesses. Some hotels, for example, have been known to require dialing "91+" to make an outside call. This leads numbers being dialed such as 91+1+301+555+2368. Since this is a valid telephone number which starts with the digits 911, and is not a call to an emergency service, a timeout becomes necessary on calls dialed literally as 911 to avoid accidental calls to the emergency number. Such prefixes for dialing outside calls are strongly discouraged by telephone companies for this reason. The need to avoid accidental 9-1-1 calls is also part of the reasoning behind why no area code starts with a "1": the slightly less troublesome "outside line" prefix of "9+" would then cause the same problem: "9+114+555+2368", for example. This can still be an issue with long distance calling in places that require an "outside line" prefix; a number might then start "9+1+" and, given the possibility of mis-dialing and pressing the "1" twice, still cause a problem. Requiring an "outside line" prefix also means that to complete an intended call to 9-1-1 from a hotel or business that uses a prefix, a caller would have to know to dial the "outside line" prefix first, rendering the emergency number as 91-9-1-1 or 9-9-1-1. Another possible problem with 9-1-1 dialing is that the international phone code for India is "91", and sometimes calls meant for India end up at local emergency dispatch offices if a caller did not first dial the international call prefix 011.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-1-1

Ok. It looks like I am not the only one and definately not the last one who encounters this accident! If they keep using 9 and 1 as the first two digits for making a local call, I'm sure this episode is going to happen again and again.

PS. Actually, I just need to dial 9 and then press 1-800-xxx-xxx to avoid calling 911. Good... No more 911 for me!