The emergency dispatchers who handle calls to 911 must grapple with urgent situations, frantic callers and garbled messages.
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San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management wanted to know why calls to its call center increased 28 percent in 2014 compared with 2011.
As if that’s not enough, now they’re facing another challenge: butt dialing.
This is in large part due to a requirement that all smartphones must allow for emergency 911 calls to be made without unlocking the phone which vastly increases the possibility of a butt dial from a person’s pocket or purse. That takes time-the average process takes one minute and 14 seconds-and leaves fewer operators available to answer real calls.
Emergency dispatchers surveyed in the study said such calls were a big time suck.
Many of those calls, say the researchers, were errant “pocket dials” in which a user forgets to lock the phone and then, by sitting down, accidentally dials a number, in this case emergency services.
These butt calls are putting an unsafe strain on the system, not unlike the strain an actual butt puts on an unsteady lawn chair that’s been on the deck all winter.
In one sample of 197 wireless calls, 30 percent were caused by accidental dials. Of these calls, 88 percent received a call-back from the dispatcher, a process that took anything between 5 seconds and two and a half minutes, further taxing the overburdened emergency-response system.
The FCC has also looked into this issue in New York City, saying they believe 50 percent of emergency calls were mistaken butt dials.
In the United Kingdom, emergency call centers adopted a system to quickly identify butt dials by prompting the caller to press “55” if they were there, according to the BBC.
“If my anecdotal experiences are remotely accurate”, O’Reilly writes, “it would mean that approximately 84 million 911 calls a year are pocket-dials”. “This is a huge waste of resources, raises the cost of providing 911 services…and increases the risk that legitimate 911 calls- and first responders-will be delayed”. The Federal Communications has acknowledged that pocket dialing is a growing problem, given that more than 90 percent of Americans now own a cellphone.
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An interesting-slash-scary report from the BBC this week suggests that butt dialing may be a much more serious problem than we realized.
