Emergency which service.

Many years ago I used to work for BT taking 999 and 100 calls.

Rather often the BT caller ID lookup would fail. So if you called in a 999 call we’d have no idea what service centre to connect you to, from your number as the number needed is different for each location. Most of the operators learnt a decent amount of connecting numbers by heart so you'd live. And the back up system was a basic page of text you'd have to scroll down for ages!

However, if you called in from a mobile and didn’t know where you were. You were about as fucked as you could be. We'd have to go off and get a big book binder of mobile mast numbers and connect you that way. It was rare to get mobile 999 call and the system being down and the mobile look up system being down. But when it all was it would take 10 mins to sort out.

I filed a report on the BT bug reporting system about it. I used lots of swear words. About 30mins after I pressed send I almost got the sack but when you've just dealt with a call like “How’s the neck bleeding? Or “Can your baby still breath?”. They had to agree it was shite situation to be in!

I've been at the other end of some very nasty Mobile phone disasters which i'd rather not have to think about again (thanks!).
(waxdart hello., Wed 5 Aug 2009, 13:27, Reply)