Some years ago, a guy told me a funny story. Apparently, a caller reported a curious incident to the police. He had left for work one morning, but, before he left, being the organised bachelor he was, he carried his laundered garments, including a pair of blue pants, out to the clothesline in the back yard to dry in the midday sun.
On returning from work, though, the guy made an odd discovery when he went to the back yard to collect his pants: The blue pants that he had hung on the line that morning had turned white. Frightened, he did the one thing that anyone faced with such a bizarre event would. He called the police to investigate. Perhaps he had made a mistake and laundered his clothes in bleach, or maybe someone with a serious grudge against him skulked into his back yard while he was away and exacted a little vengeance on him by tampering with his clothes. I doubted that the police department wasted precious resources on this matter as it was also very likely that he was stark mad, which is the widely accepted conclusion.
In another personal incident, one night as I was about to turn in to bed—except for my bedroom, the lights in the rest of the flat had been turned off—I heard keys turning in my front door. No one else, at that time, had access to my apartment, only my landlord, and he wasn’t allowed in without prior permission, and certainly not after midnight. Before I reached the door or managed a helluva scream, four uniformed officers had already made their way into my apartment, shining their torch light around the flat.
“Mam, did you know you left your keys in the door?” one officer said, as he switched on the light at the door.
I didn’t respond, at least not verbally, but I just extended my hand to collect my keys from him.
“Is this flat 4?
“Yeah.”
“Do you live here alone?”
“Yeah.”
“We received a call that there’s someone here with a split throat…”
“No; Not here.”
“Mind if we have a look around?”
“No. No problem.”
After they conducted their investigation and confirmed that there wasn’t someone bleeding to death from a slit throat in my flat, they turned to leave, but not before one officer gave me a kind of stern warning about the risks forgetting my keys in the door as it was unsafe and an invitation to be victimised. I thanked them and they bounded down the stairs with all their emergency medical equipment.
The police and emergency response agencies field lots of calls every day and they have the difficult task of “prioritizing” their responses. Clearly, a report of someone bleeding from a potentially grievous wound—although in my case it eventually proved to be a prank call—receives high priority and immediate attention to a complaint—which may have been genuine—by a man who was convinced that someone had messed with his laundry.
So, in an attempt to inform the public about their daily workload, to show off their “new –age thinking, technologically-savvy culture”, and maybe to deter people from making calls about “stupid” things or to at least stop and count to ten before picking up the phone to call the emergency line, the Greater Manchester Police department has recently launched what I call PIE, and what it’s Chief Constable Peter Fahy calls a Police Information Exercise. Via the popular twitter site, people interested in the day-to-day emergency calls received by the police department can view then—and have a “tweet” laugh while they’re at it.
The site has over 12000 followers since it began operation and has reported emergency cases of hilarity, including a woman who wanted help suing the government because she was broke. Let’ see what happens next.
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