About 3,000 miles from Barnstable, there’s a small town in western England called Barnstaple.
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Last week, the similarities in the names created some confusion.
MA cops were baffled last week when a British woman called from several thousand miles away to report a vehicle accident.
In the call above, Officer McWilliams, the Barnstable Police dispatcher, struggles to understand exactly where the woman is calling from. A perplexed McWilliams asks the woman where she is, to which she replies: “Ilfracombe”.
It just so happened that the officer she was speaking with was in Barnstable, Mass., not Barnstaple in the United Kingdom. She told WEWS-TV in Cleveland that she’s humiliated and embarrassed.
“There’s no way you can help me then, is there”, the woman asks. “You can’t be because Ilfracombe is the next town over from Muddiford”.
It reads like a conversation straight out of an Abbott and Costello routine: a woman attempts to inform her local police department about a hit and run, but the dispatcher seems to have no idea what she was talking about.
“I haven’t stopped laughing”, she said. But she made one mistake – she made the call from England. “I’m sorry, I’m having a little trouble hearing you”.
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The two share a laugh and McWilliams deadpans: “Our response time is going to be about six hours”.
