My hamster's loose! Call 911!
There's over-reacting. And then there's calling 911 when your pet hamster gets loose.
Of course, that's exactly what a woman in Yorkshire, England, did when her rodent made the grand escape recently, a fellow pets blogger at the Los Angeles Times points out.
"It's my hamster. It's got out of its cage. It's gone into the bathroom and it's gone down into the floorboards," the woman can be heard telling an emergency-line operator in the recently released recording of her frantic 999 call. A short time later, she asks the operator, "Is there any chance anyone could come and help me get it out?"
South Yorkshire police released the recording to draw attention to what they say is a big problem: non-emergency calls placed to the emergency line.
"You never know when it could be you in desperate need of help and the last thing you need is to lose vital seconds or minutes because someone has called 999 to order a taxi," police superintendent Rob Odell said in a statement. "We've worked hard to reduce our average response time to emergency calls to just eight seconds, but our service could be improved even further if people did not waste our time when phoning 999."
Odell estimates that eight out of 10 so-called emergency calls received by his department don't actually constitute emergencies.
Photo of sweet little hamster courtesy of JesseBarker's photostream on Flickr.
Comments
Not enough info--what happened to the hamster? This could be an emergency from the hamster's point of view.
Posted by: Dahlink | July 7, 2009 5:55 PM