Out of 90,000 people who reside in Quincy, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, Mike Bowes' was the home in flames, and he had answered the emergency call

Hang on - given there's likely only a handful of dispatchers covering the town, and the call that Mike's house was on fire has to be answered by one of them, it's not that unlikely it'd end up being him.

In fact, if you're a dispatcher covering a smallish area, the chance of encountering an emergency that in some way relates to you personally must be quite high.

I have a coworker who got stuck in an elevator once. She pressed the emergency call button and her mother answered.

I think I'd have nightmares about that. It's way too Freudian, or something.

Wow!!!

When I was a kid, my grandmother was an operator for New Jersey Bell and we always knew that if there was an emergency, we could dial '0' and ask for Margaret. Obviously this was long before call centers were outsourced; when you called '0' you got someone in the big Bell building on Maple Avenue.

given there's likely only a handful of dispatchers covering the town, and the call that Mike's house was on fire has to be answered by one of them, it's not that unlikely it'd end up being him.

I think it was the unlikely situation that, of all the people in the town, HIS house would be the one on fire.

Holy Crap!

There was also a landlord living in upstairs. Firefighters arrived within minutes and helped her to safety.

So... if it was a her, shouldn't she be called a landlady?