By now everyone knows that wireless phones are dangerous. They’re giving us CANCER after all, probably. And as Bell Biv Devoe astutely noted back in the early 90s, you can never trust a big butt (and a smile), because big butts are also dangerous. Put the two together and you’ve got a genuine goddamn scourge that’s threatening lives: rampant butt dialing of 911. Specifically, a new report estimates that 40% of the 911 calls placed in New York City are actually butt dials.
Reports the NY Daily News:
The city’s emergency communications system is being flooded with nearly 4 million calls a year from people who inadvertently dial 911 on cell phones.
An astounding 38% of some 10.4 million calls to 911 during 2010 involved such accidental or false alarm “short calls” of 19 seconds or less — that’s an average of 10,700 false calls a day.
Most of the calls — commonly referred to as butt calls — came from cell phone users who mistakenly dial 911 when making contact with phones in their back pockets, purses or elsewhere. Each time one occurred, NYPD operators lost valuable time trying to determine if someone was even on the line.
Scoff if you want, but how’d you like to not be unable to get a 911 operator on the phone if you were, say, attacked by a grizzly bear? Yeah, that’d be below average wouldn’t it?
In other news, America’s butts have some serious phone-dialing skillz!