Only once. I was standing at the living room window of an apartment I'd just finished moving into the night before, and I saw a man get run over by a car in the crosswalk in front of the building.

This was in the days before cell phones were really prevalent, so I suspect I was the first person to call. (The man was killed, though, unfortunately.)

When I was a kid I called it once by accident. I meant to dial 411 for a free phone # listing.

Little did I know 911 traces all calls and, in fact, calling and hanging up (which is what I did in a panic when I heard "911, what is your emergency!?" instead of "What city please?") is actually the fastest way to get a cop out to your house.

Five minutes later a large muscley officer wrapped in a thick biker's leather knocked on the door and I had to say, "What? 911 call from here?! Um, uh, I think maybe I dialed that by accident."

Damn BP , that must've rocked your world.

I don't think I've ever called it. *thinks*

It was called for me last summer when I broke my ankle.

Someone called it for us 2 years ago when my sister's car was on fire (we were driving and it did something weird, we stopped and noticed the engine seemed to be on fire- and of course my sister parked near all these other cars, so I'm sitting there worrying the car is going to explode and ruin a whole row of cars...). I tell you, there is nothing like heraing sirens in the distance and knowing, they're coming! They're coming for us! Hurray hurray!

And here's a story -- a former coworker named Mary came into work one day horribly sunburned. She told me she'd done it on Saturday, and spent Sunday lying around wearing only one of her husband's t-shirts. She had this telephone with a speed dial, and they had programmed 911 into it so all you had to do was hit one button instead of 3 to call 911 (I know, sounds silly to me too). So on Sunday their cat goes walking across the desk, knocks the phone off the hook, and steps on the magic button. 911 arrives. Husband Bob is most puzzled, says everything's fine. Is anyone else here, 911 wants to know. So poor Mary has to come out of the bedroom and tell them everything's fine, which they didn't really believe because she looked like hell, and they also didn't think much of the explanation that Fluff the Cat had been the caller. It took a lot of discussion before they finally went away.

Just once, when someone broke into my place through an insufficently-closed window in the middle of the night. Thankfully, he was pretty inept, and made a tremendous noise crashing through the venetian blinds. I thought it was my cat trying to launch herself at squirrels again, and came storming out of my bedroom yelling curses, and the guy fled. I remember that the 911 operator was blase to the point of nonchalance, and of course in retrospect I can see that a bungled burglary was probably low on the list of crises she'd encountered that night, even.

Twice. Once, in college, when I witnessed one drunken homeless guy beating the shit out of another nearly incapacitated drunken homeless guy at a bus stop. And then again last year after coming upon the scene of a horrific car wreck moments after it happened. Props to 911 dispatchers everywhere -- it's a job I could never do, myself.

Once while in the office on a Saturday with my boss and a co-worker, I walked out to our little loading dock to have a cigarette and there was a dude laying on the ground with no shirt on. I yelled at him and then jumped down to see if he was breathing, which he was, but he wouldn't wake up. So I went inside and sent my co-worker (who just finished paramedic training as luck would have it) to look at him while I called 911. The fire department showed up five minutes later (they're two blocks away) and my co-worker, who was kneeling over the guy, started reeling off a long technical explanation full of medico-babble. In true FDNY fashion the emt/fireman cuts him off and checks the guys pulse, peels back his eyelids and sorta pinches his cheek and then says "All partied out, huh buddy?" and they call an ambulance and smoke cigarettes while they wait.

That's the only time I've called 911 myself, although I've been around a bunch when it was called by others for similar things and at least twice when I managed to get someone else to dial 911 instead of .357.

I called it once years ago when I came home late at night and it appeared there was a small but uncontrolled fire in the downstairs apartment next door. The fire trucks were there in about three minutes and ended up kicking in the door because no one answered right away. They dragged out a coffee table that had what looked like a lantern that had melted on top; that was what I had seen. There was also quite a bit of smoke.

Soon, everyone on the street had come out to see what was going on, including the people who owned the house in question - they lived upstairs in it. Then, the occupant of the on-fire apartment came stumbling out, past the fan the firemen had set up to blow the smoke out of the building. He was obviously seriously drunk or high, and didn't seem to understand why there were a bunch of burly men in heavy plastic outfits in his apartment. The landlord angrily confronted him; I thought for sure he was gonna get smacked. Once it looked like the "fire" had been taken care of, I went home to bed.

I noticed a couple of days later that there was a "For Rent" sign in the window of the downstairs apartment.

Oh yeah, also the 911 operator was hilariously deliberate, even though I was calm and methodical, reporting that the man was unconscious, but breathing and not obviously injured. In fact I said all that and then she asked me twice more "Is he breathing?" and "Is he conscious?" and so on. I guess many people are spazzing when they call. Her Staten Island accent was very soothing.

I have called in two vehicle v. pedestrian accidents, two lightening strikes in the woods that set trees afire, and one time when someone tried to break in my house.

All ended well.

Never. You know, my mom tried to get a job as a 911 operator. It's actually incredibly difficult to get hired - they go through extensive background checks, looking for histories of mental illness and so on. After she was hired, she went through a few days of training and then "shadowed" another operator for awhile.

When she took her first call (with another operator monitoring), she started having serious heart palpitations, just from the terror and panic in the voice on the line. She eventually quit a few days later - she just couldn't stay calm like the operators have to. It's a ridiculously difficult job and those operators must have nerves of steel!

Once. I saw a cab hit a pedestrian right at the corner of St. Marks & Bowery. The person who was hit flew right up in the air; it was awful. So I called from the payphone but the 911 operator kept asking me whether the person who had been hit was male or female and I had no idea. This was St. Marks in the late 80s - honey, there was just no telling. They showed up really fast though.

Also in the East Village one time I woke up to the sound of someone slowly and deliberately kicking in the building door. They were taking their sweet time and then they still would have had to go through my apartment door so I didn't think it was really an emergency and I looked up the precinct number and called them instead. The officer who answered my call thought this was hilarious - that I didn't feel someone kicking in the door was an emergency. But, you know, I still don't think it was.

My friend who was a Baltimore city cop for 24 years has a lot of crazy 911 stories; my favorite is the lady who called because her pizza was cold. She wanted the delivery guy arrested - my friend told her that if anyone was getting arrested it was going to be her. That shut her up quick.

BTW, if it weren't for a paycut, I would have become a 911 operator. I know the people over at the 911 center, as part of my job, and it is a first class operation. I have watched them doing their job.

These people have high stress jobs, but they are VERY well trained. They have screens that show the locations of all fire trucks, ambulances, and cop cars. There is a scenario for every eventuality.

The local premium coffee roaster also donates a lot of good coffee to this place, and they have a good gym on premises.

I stopped to help a stranded motorist on the New York Thruway once. He didn't have a cell phone so I let him use mine, but we were in a dead spot. As I left I called 911 to get him a tow.

Little did I know 911 traces all calls and, in fact, calling and hanging up (which is what I did in a panic when I heard "911, what is your emergency!?" instead of "What city please?") is actually the fastest way to get a cop out to your house.

That is because of this.

I called 911 when a 93 year old woman I was waiting on in a restaurant passed out. Luckily the younger, sixty-ish, friend she was having lunch with was very composed and helpful, holding her up, telling me everything the dispatchers needed to know. We thought she may have had a stroke, but she woke up as the EMTs were getting there and seemed ok. That was a while ago so she could be gone now...
It never looks good when an ambulance pulls up to your restaurant.

I've called a handful of times. Once by mistake (411 versus 911). Once for an out-of-control car repeatedly crashing into parked cars at 3:00 a.m. in a relatively quiet neighborhood. Once for a mugging I witnessed (not mine). Once for a disabled car clogging a busy off ramp. Once for a guy breaking into a car by smashing the car window right in front of me in the middle of the day.

These were all in San Francisco -- each time I've been semi-shocked by how long it takes to get through (3 to 4 minutes).

[I just cut out several unrelated paragraphs re: my late partner's illness, my former neighbors, and a bonefide stalker.]

But the most interesting reaction I ever got from the police was the day I called the non-emergency number. I was 19, living in my first apartment, and went down to the laundry room to discover that my clothes had been stolen. In a fit of pique, I called the cops, though not 911, on the off-chance they would make a report. The thoroughly bored desk officer asked me what was missing, and said, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," as I answered his question.. until my afterthought: "Oh, and about twenty pairs of underwear."

[pause] "Someone stole your underwear?"

"Yes!"

"A car will be right over."

Within three minutes, two officers were in my building, interviewing me, checking out the locks, very interested in my safety, advising me to watch out for sexual predators.

Hmm, I've called it about four times, once when I found my father having a heart attack, and the other times were when I was reporting car accidents. Like the time someone drove THROUGH a power pole, and the wires were down across the road, that was interesting. I had seen the whole nighttime sky lit up green down the road, and then everything went dark, so I slowed down, and stopped in time before I reached the wires.

Never and I hope I never have to.

Called 2 nights ago. In the middle of a heavy rainstorm, there was a fire on the electric line behind the house. The plastic covering was melting and dripping flame, so it was real pretty. They didn't arrive very fast, and were quite nonchalant. The electric company came and fixed it.

We were visiting my grandmother one time and she had a heart attack, so we called 911. Her house was a tract house in a subdivision where all the streets were on a grid and the street she lived on was perpendicular to the highway. Her house was about half a mile off the highway. My brother and I went outside to wait for the ambulance, and we could hear its sirens pretty quickly. A minute or two later, we saw them turning off the highway onto grandma's street, drive a couple of blocks, and turn off onto a side street. Then their sirens got fainter and fainter. They got lost. Fortunately, she survived, so it was funny instead of horrible.

3 times for true emergencies:
First time, a very good friend died of AIDS at home. We called 911 to take care of the paperwork (it was a hospice thing).
2nd time, to report an accident.
3rd time, to report a drunk driver (turns out he wasn't drunk but was over-medicated and under-blooded after a rigorous doctor's appointment).

...And I have called 911 at every workplace we install phone systems, to verify the appropriate address and suite is on file with the local PD. (What? You haven't dialed 911 and said "Verify my address, please?" Please do so. Thanks!)

Oh, there was one other time when 911 was called on my behalf, although I didn't place the call myself. I was mugged/robbed on my way from my job to the bank on an early Sunday morning. I went back to the restaurant I worked for, and between the time I had left and come back my boss had shown up for the next day's shift. I still giggle about that, because it was quite alarming from her perspective:

1)I was obviously upset;

2)I had wrestled away the mugger's weapon (a claw hammer) and was still carrying it.

She told me much later that for a second or two she thought that I had come back to put a hammer through her head. Not that there were people I wouldn't have enjoyed doing that to at one time or other, but she was not one of them.

Just once, when my mom got attacked by a swarm of bees. She came barreling in the house and jumped straight into the shower. After a few minutes, I decided to check on her and found her passed out on the floor. When she got to the hospital, they estimated she had been stung 50+ times.

For Halloween that year she donned a hospital gown, teased up her hair, glued fake bees all over her and went as herself getting attacked by bees.

Quite a few times, definitely more than most here.

- When an elderly guy had a heart attack on the bus
- Another guy had an epileptic seizure on the bus, plus I worked in a service for people with developmental disabilities where we had a few service users with severe epilepsy whose seizures often required paramedic attention
- When a guy off his head on meth kicked our back door in because he thought his girlfriend was tied up in a chair in our living room (she wasn't)
- Several car accidents, probably 7 or 8 - call emergency services and then call the tow truck company to get the spotter's fee
- Once when the house across the road was set on fire - successfully achieving the purpose of murdering the occupant, over a custody case and then we sat on the verandah drinking beer and watching it burn - after offering assistance, of course
- Another time when I was working the door for a strip club and a guy started getting violent with a knife after being caught wanking in the club
- Three or four times to report domestic violence (sadly, the same couple)
- Once when the electrical substation nearby blew - that was spectacular, I was walking my dog through the park and saw it from the perfect distance (safe, but close enough to be awesome). Kicking myself I didn't have a camera
- And once when my sister fell out of a tree and knocked herself out when we were kids

These were all in Australia - I haven't yet had to call emergency services in the 3 years I've been in the UK. I think it's easier to be oblivious to things that happen around you when there are so many people around, all the time, as there is in London.

Something else - I lived with someone for a few years who listened to a police scanner. All. The. Time. It was annoying as hell, but occasionally very interesting - about a quarter of dispatches were for domestic violence or breaches of Apprehended Violence Orders. Another quarter was officers calling in suspect vehicle registrations. There was a lot of suicides. But I was most surprised at the really extreme grisly stuff that never made it to the news - bizarre animal cruelty, murder-suicide pacts, ritualistic child killings. Those are the things that would drive the operators (and the officers) to drink. I thought reporters also listened to scanners? Or is there sometimes agreement between media and the police to not broadcast some of the really horrible things that occur?

I must be neurotic and quick to jump to conclusions, because I've called more times than I can count. Several car accidents, several drunk drivers (I always call if I see someone driving like they're drunk; I figure someone has to before something bad happens); several fires; a handful of occasions when one of my coworkers left her dogs in her Volvo all day, IN THE SUMMER, in the office parking lot (animal control makes you call 911 first); and too many incidents of domestic violence next door to recall.

I called last summer during a fire in an apartment two floors below my friend's place. Smoke was pouring out of a fourth-story window, and while my friend ran down, dragged the junkie responsible for the fire from her apartment (she later admitted that she was trying to kill herself and everyone in the building), and fought the blaze (a leaping stove fire) with buckets of water and a fire extinguisher, I called 911, corralled and carriered his cat, and ushered his girlfriend to the street below.

The woman on the 911 line was as calm as I was, and I was able to give clear information on where the building was and what floor I thought the fire was on, and then say, "Do you have enough information? I'm above the fire, and I'd better get out."

We got to the street level just as the NYFD arrived, with three hook and ladder trucks, and I held the front doors open and told each fireman as they entered, "Fourth floor, in the back. Fourth floor, in the back."

The fire was easily contained, and the neighbor was summarily evicted, and the fire chief on the scene told my friend he deserved a (positive) citation for saving her life, and that by calling 911 so quickly, the building was saved.

My friends were amazed that I managed to get Mina, the cat, into her carrier without a scratch. I chalk it up to a combination of vast experience handling kittens and puppies while working in animal care at a pet store, and a rare understanding Mina and I share (since I wear Carharrt dungarees with their double layer of fabric on the thigh, I'm the only person in the world who doesn't push her off my lap when she stretches and kneads her claws. This goes a long way).

When I think of that incident, and how everybody was saved, I want to cry a little. I don't know why.

Never.

The only time I remember needing it was in Germany, where we barely missed a car wreck on the left lane of the Autobahn (we were at 180km/h (which's actually kind of slow for the hi-speed lane of the Autobahn!), it was snowing, and the wreck was just after a hill, so it was only visible from less than 50m).

We stopped at a gas station to ask someone to call and report it (we didn't speak German ourselves). I'm not sure they actually called, though, because they didn't seem to be believing the "tourists" there :\

Hugh, I thought of your story. I meant to try to find and link to it, but I got busy.

Seven, I think. Once in college when I heard brakes slam, a car screeching, and then a lot of people yelling as if something bad had happened. I couldn't see anything, though (it had happened around the corner), so I second-guessed myself after dialing and hung up before they answered. They called *right* back and I explained what I had heard but that I had no idea what had actually happened, and the ambulances arrived within a few minutes.

Once after seeing two cars (I think) looking as if they had just crashed on the median.

Once after hearing what I thought was gunfire at my old apartment.

Once after hearing so much crashing around and screaming next door that I thought my neighbors were throwing furniture at each other. (Turns out they had locked themselves into the house. They were not very bright.)

Once after those same neighbors locked their 17-year-old kid out (on purpose), and he decided the best way to deal with this was to bellow at the top of his lungs right outside my window. It was 3am, and he was drunk or stoned or both enough not to pay any attention to my telling him to quit it.

Once when I was walking home right at dusk and a homeless guy sitting on a neighbor's porch just looked... wrong somehow. He gave me the impression that he had ducked into the entryway to hide from me, and I didn't recognize him as being one of the regular guys who hung out on the street. The operator on that one was great -- I hemmed and hawed about why I was calling, and she very efficiently said, "He just creeped you out, is that it?" Heh.

And once when the playground down the street had flames shooting out of the fort thing at the top of the slide. No one was hurt, and it was rather immensely fun watching a bunch of firefighters climb up the slide and clamber over the jungle gym to put out the fire.

Called 911 only a couple times while driving, only to be directed to the state police so I could report drunk drivers and irratic driving (the kind that makes me put a couple hundred feet between that car and myself and fear for everone around them).

I have the local police's non-emergency line on speed dial, though, after a string of car breakins and such.

Oh and one time to report a telephone pole which had caught on fire. Not too uncommon, I hear, but it was sparking something awful and the flames were shooting up and it was right beneath some very dry branches in the dead of winter right next to a major road, haha. So I think it was justified.

Once when a pickup truck overturned just down the street. A couple of girls lying on their sides in the truck, screaming. They actually were okay.

At least twice on a couple next door. The one time, it sounded like they were throwing furniture, and as I called 911, I realized the police were already there and they were throwing furniture in front of them! They both were hauled away that night.

Once when I took in a shaking neighbor (not from the couple above) and her boyfriend started trying to break down my door to get to her.

My husband and I were returning from a night out, when we came upon a drunk sprawled in the middle of the road. My husband got out to move him and his bicycle out of the road, and saw that he was bleeding from the head. We called to get him medical attention.
I think that was it. I have called the non-emergency numbers for out-of-control neighbors, fender-benders, and minor stuff like that.

Twice. The first was a car accident that I had caused when I was 17: the other guy demanded I call the cops. Everyone was fine, the guy's pickup was totaled but he didn't have insurance so the cops wrote him a ticket. Dumbass.

The second was when a coworker had ran a stoplight and plowed into another vehicle. She freaked out and called the office before she even got out of her car. I got the details, calmed her down a bit, convinced her to get out and check on the others, and called 911 for her.

When a car hit me on my bicycle, I asked someone to call 911 for me, but I'm not going to count that.

My experience is a lot like mudpuppie's. Unconscious people on the sidewalk (probably passed-out drunks, but you never know), neighbor domestic violence, strangers crawling around the underbrush, weird erratic driving, assorted car accidents, fires, &c.

I have nightmares where, for instance, I see a passenger jet crash right in front of me and then I have a panic attack trying to determine if this is a big enough emergency to call 911 about.

I have these conflicting anxieties about calling. On one hand, I'm scared to death of wasting their resources. On the other hand, I have a deep morally-driven fear of falling prey to the bystander effect.

That being said, recently I've had the opportunity to call an above-average number of times, but not for anything horrible, so I suppose I have a low tolerance for "emergencies." I try to call the non-emergency number whenever possible. The other day I was riding my bike and I used a garden hose to put out a clearly deliberate fire in someone's curbside lawn debris. Since there's been a nasty arsonist operating in our neighborhood, I called the non-emergency number to report it (So maybe they'd have an extra datapoint) but it rang for a long, long time and I gave up.

Last week I called 911 because our neighbors were having a domestic dispute that involved every other sentence paraphrasing the idea, "I'm going to kill you," and the sounds of items being thrown. I still felt really anxious and guilt-ridden about calling.

One time I thought I heard gunshots coming from the street outside, but I was doubtful and went back to sleep. I called the non-emergency number the next day and they blew me off.

Fairly recently our CO detector went bonkers and we called the fire department.