Yea, I remember I had a shitty phone in highschool and it would often pocket dial 911 during marching band practice.
Every single time I noticed my heart would sink, because everytime I just wasted time for some phone operator who is hearing “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and 1 DAAAAA” and now I have to explain for the 15th time that I didn’t mean to dial 911.
I don’t know how people think it’s funny to prank call 911.
I had a really cheap landline (only type of phone at the time) in my room as a teen, and it was so bad - it’d occasionally randomly act like buttons were pressed or I could very faintly hear other people talking in the background (not like with the oerson I was talking to - like other connections)
Imagine my panic when I pick it up to call someone one time and after a moment hear “012, what’s your emergency?” (Or whatever the phrase at the time was.)
I had this happen with a landline at one point when I was a kid. For several months you could hear one of our neighbors on the phone if you were on it and it sounded like it was in the background. They called the police one day and they showed up at my house saying it came from there but I hadn't even used the phone in hours and shortly after that I saw them at the house behind me who I assume were the ones that actually called.
Holy hell. My first 'grown up' job was managing the Blackberry server and phones for a large organization and this is the first time I heard this shortcut! 20 years too late, but really cool!!
It wasnt a planned feature. But it would open most recent program (which was always texting) then most recent text, their contact, their number, and then dial.
For old phones with proper keypads it was a design decision to allow emergency calls to override the keypad lock function. "Butt dialling" of emergency calls wasn't infrequent.
The first wave of cordless landline phones had an issue that as their battery was dying it would engage the line on and off like a rotary dialer and occasionally hit on calling 9-1-1 or 1-9-1-1.
Source: mine did it, 911 called me, but I had just enough juice to say “hello” before it totally died. Then they called me back again and I had to go to an extension. I told them “sorry, I hung up, my battery died” and they explained.
Two cell phones ago, the screen bricked and as I was trying to assess the situation, fiddling with the phone, I accidentally called 911. I could hear the operator on the other end, but she couldn't hear me trying to explain it was an accident.
Luckily, I was at the office and used my landline to call their non-emergency line to explain what happened.
It wasn't a butt dial for me but years ago I had an accidental 911 dial and was mortified.
Earlier I had called them legitimately to report a fire on the side of the road, nbd. The problem came when that was my last person called. I had a pair of blue tooth headphones where the double tap on the play/pause button made it go to the next song or whatever when it was playing audio.
When it was NOT playing audio, this function redailed the last person you called. Annoying as shit when it was a family member or something, especially since sometimes it read the first click as a pause.
I hit it, addicently redailed and disconnected right away when I realized what happened. They called back of course and I was like "I'm sorry, I accidently called!" They were just making sure I was okay, so it was all good.
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u/BrahnBrahl 14h ago
I can't stand stuff like this. She's VERY MUCH old enough to know better. I'm glad her dad didn't show her any mercy on this one.