A woman in Florida was recently arrested for calling 911 to complain that they wouldn’t serve her a Jell-O shot. That isn’t the most absurd reason someone has called the cops…but it’s up there.
Buzzfeed put out a list of the dumbest reasons people have called 91…straight from 911 dispatchers themselves. Here are some highlights:
1. This one might deserve a BIT of a pass: A 96-year-old woman called 911 to report a missing child…because her 68-year-old daughter hadn’t gotten back by dark. (Yeah, but the woman was 96, after all.)
2. A lady called in from a Wendy’s drive-thru, because they wouldn’t sell her a Whopper. (Whoppers are sold at Burger King by the way.)
3. A guy called during a power outage to ask for the score of the USA / Canada Olympic Gold Medal game. The dispatcher said, “I’m Canadian. Obviously, I told him.”
4. Someone called to report that their neighbors were “dropping pebbles” into her pebbled driveway. Turns out, it wasn’t happening, and she had actually been harassing them for months.
5. Someone called 911 because they were a tourist and bored, and didn’t have much money…so they wanted some tips on what to do.
6. Someone called to report a missing Amazon package, despite it showing as “delivered.” The caller later found out that it was delivered to the wrong floor of their apartment building.
7. An adult admitted that they got in trouble for calling 911 when they were a child, because their grandparents were insisting that they eat a hot dog.
(Most of us have heard about a KID calling 911, accidentally or not. Does your story beat the hot dog one? Would it matter if that hot dog had been boiled? Grandparents have been known to do that.)
8. An older lady called to complain that a random man “didn’t hold the door open for her.”
9. One dispatcher said, “I got yelled at once because no one turned on the Northern Lights.”
10. And there’s this amusing story from a retired cop: “A woman would call four or five times a week because of a ghost in her attic. We finally gave up on telling her to stop, and went over there with a mason jar . . .
“We said, ‘We’re going to fix your problem.’ We went up, shuffled around, lit a cigarette, blew the smoke into the jar, and put the lid on. We went back down, and said, ‘We got him!’ She was thrilled. And we never heard from her again.”
(Buzzfeed)