Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

911 is no joke

Who, Me? Greetings, gentle readerfolk, and welcome to Who Me? the section of The Reg in which we soften the crushing blow of the working week’s return with tales of technical transgression.

We shall Regomize this week's hero – if that's the word – as "William" and let you know he once had a job configuring a corporate telephone system for a client in the US. Each desk had its own three-digit extension, and each office had a dedicated range of three-digit extension numbers. Care had to be taken when allocating ranges not to overlap extensions.

A few weeks after the initial installation at the client’s HQ, the org added some more desks. Could William and his crew arrange more phones, assign them with numbers, and so on?

William tasked a subordinate with adding new extensions. That worthy looked at the last number that had been implemented, and just kept going: each new phone he connected had a number one higher than the predecessor.

Some time later, William was in the client's HQ working on something unrelated, when an unfortunate incident took place. A customer stormed into the office and began loudly arguing with an employee. Attempt to de-escalate the situation failed, and it reached the point at which someone in the office decided it was time to summon police assistance.

That someone dialed 911, and their call was answered with impressive promptness … by a chap named Chuck, the client's safety manager, who was not a Police officer and despite his role just not the appropriate person to handle the situation.

Someone else used their cellphone to call 91.

Which still left William wondering why Chuck's day had been interrupted in this manner. Having configured the phone system, it kind of fell on William's shoulders, as emergency calls ought to go to the police, not to Chuck.

He wondered at first whether it had been a misdial, but the phone logs proved otherwise. He investigated whether there was some corruption of the system causing 911 calls to be misdirected – again, no.

The solution turned out to be, as you've probably guessed, quite simple: William's subordinate, who had been assigned the task of configuring incremental phone extensions, had given someone else the number 910, assigned 911 to Chuck, and 912 to whoever came next, after forgetting for a brief yet crucial moment that that 911 is no joke.

Both William and his subordinate were mortified by the error, but glad to have learned “an important lesson.”

What's a bit of on-the-job training you've got the hard way, when a simple mistake was discovered? Tell us all about it in an email to Who, Me? and we may turn your tale into fodder to brighten some future Monday morn. ®