Nigel Whitfield <nigelw@ibmpcug.co.uk> (08/08/90)
I thought I'd write a few words on this, since it relates in some ways to the discussions that have been going on about 911 service. I have only had occassion to dial 999 once in an emergency, though I have done so accidentally a couple of times. Each time, the phone is always answered promptly. When we really needed assistance, because there was a person trying to break into the house, the police arrived within a few minutes, having driven through the town the wrong way and straight across the front lawn to stop the man escaping. Other people I know who have used the service seem to find that it's generally very quick to respond, though there have been notable problems, such as the Hillborough incident. I think, though, that that was more a failing of the emergency services themselves than the 999 service. As far as I can tell from using the phone system, 999 is answered at the local telephone exchange, or in the city exchange for a rural area. It is not uncommon for a conversation with the operator to be interrupted with "Sorry - 999 call. Goodbye" A couple of asides come to mind here... 1) In a lot of towns, you can actually reach the emergency services by dialling 99. This is because the rural exchanges will dial 9 to access the town, a allowing 99 to trigger the service means that rural subscribers can also dial 99, without having to have an operator at the local exchange. It also means that problems are caused. The village where I was at school had three figure telephone numbers on an exchange called Long Sutton. (Though the call box was known as Long Sutton 250X). To dial home to my mother in Winchester, I had to dial to the nearest town (Basingstoke) and then on to Winchester. The code was 992. In their wisdom and desire to remove quaint telephone exchange names, BT decided to move all the phones in the village to Basingstoke numbers, prefixed with 862. (Why 862 when the old Basingstoke -> Long Sutton code was 81, is anybody's guess!) For a while there were actually Basingstoke and Long Sutton numbers in the same village, and of course dialling from the Basingstoke numbers you had to omit the initial 9. Needless to say, many people didn't, and there were an awful lot of calls to the 999 service. 2) I posted something in another group about the choice of 999 and it was suggested I post that here as well. There may well be other versions of this story, but it seems logical enough, and I think I saw it documented somewhere... It was decided to introduce a special number for emergencies after a fire (at a doctor's surgery, I believe). Obviously, such a number had to be capable of being dialled without money from a public phone. The service was first introduced in London, which used directorised strowger exchanges, and so a three figure code was necessary. At the time, it was possible to call the operator from a callbox by dialling 0, and a simple mechanical modification to the phones allowed the dialling of 9 without insertion of money as well, hence the number 999. Nigel Whitfield n.whitfield@ibmpcug.co.uk n.whitfield@cc.ic.ac.uk PLEASE NOTE MY PREFERRED MAIL ADDRESS IS n.whitfield@ibmpcug.co.uk