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you're *where*?
Jul. 30th, 2004 10:21 amI love ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tolyn's stuff. It's just so matter-of-fact, he's not gaming for the punchline or anything, just telling good stories. Anyway. The latest, which if it was in a book would be titled Don't Piss Off The Dispatcher reminds me of a personal experience some years back: as I walked into town, a car pulled up at the kerb a short distance away from me, a guy jumped out, grabbed a handbag off a girl on the pavement, leapt back in the car and off they went. I stood out on the road to get the car's license plate and then went to see if the girl was okay. Then I called 112 (GSM emergency number).
First fault: no location service. I had to tell the emergency call handler that I was in Dublin. Not, you know, where in Dublin; just that I was in Dublin. Right now we've got location-based services on WAP, but even a few years ago I would've imagined that the mobile telcos could at the very least feed crude location information back to the emergency centre for, say, people who don't know where the hell they are. Apparently not. Nice one, kids.
Second fault: The emergency call handler passed me to central Garda dispatch for Dublin, which I think is Pearse Street station. Dispatch asked me what the situation was. I realised I didn't know the name of the quay I was standing on, but I knew some immediate landmarks and one or two nearby street names. So I described my location approximately like this:
tolyn's stuff. It's just so matter-of-fact, he's not gaming for the punchline or anything, just telling good stories. Anyway. The latest, which if it was in a book would be titled Don't Piss Off The Dispatcher reminds me of a personal experience some years back: as I walked into town, a car pulled up at the kerb a short distance away from me, a guy jumped out, grabbed a handbag off a girl on the pavement, leapt back in the car and off they went. I stood out on the road to get the car's license plate and then went to see if the girl was okay. Then I called 112 (GSM emergency number).First fault: no location service. I had to tell the emergency call handler that I was in Dublin. Not, you know, where in Dublin; just that I was in Dublin. Right now we've got location-based services on WAP, but even a few years ago I would've imagined that the mobile telcos could at the very least feed crude location information back to the emergency centre for, say, people who don't know where the hell they are. Apparently not. Nice one, kids.
Second fault: The emergency call handler passed me to central Garda dispatch for Dublin, which I think is Pearse Street station. Dispatch asked me what the situation was. I realised I didn't know the name of the quay I was standing on, but I knew some immediate landmarks and one or two nearby street names. So I described my location approximately like this:
On the quays. In front of the old corporation building. Next to Parliament Bridge. Just down the quay from Parliament Street, in fact. Between Parliament Bridge and the Ha'penny Bridge.Now, that's sufficient information for someone with a tourist map to locate the few-hundred-metre stretch of quay I'm standing on. I waited for the Gardaí to show up. Eventually a squad car emerged from the alley just behind me, and I flagged it down. And very quickly established that they'd spent five or ten minutes driving around looking for me, because the dispatcher had told 'em that I was on Parliament Street. Thanks, hon. I'll bear your communication skills in mind if I ever need to call the Gardaí again.
