Hear what happened when a 10-year-old boy in Colorado called 911 for homework help
Too bad we couldn’t see the look on 911 dispatcher Chris Clow’s face when he answered the phone and a little voice on the other end of the line said this.
‘Hi, this isn’t an emergency, but I’m 10 years old and I’m working on my math homework right now, and I can’t figure out what 71 divided by 3,052 is.”
Apparently this boy figured that the numbers 9, 1 and 1 added up to an answer.
The Fort Collins (Colorado) Police Services posted the call this week to its Facebook page — and tweeted it out — with the friendly reminder to “please only call 911 for emergencies.”
“I can try to help you,” Clow is heard telling the boy in the recording. “I don’t know how to do that off the top of my head either at the moment.”
Clow told CBS 4 in Denver that though he’s ready to answer any type of call for help, this one caught him off guard.
“Some people have grown to think of 911 is a catch-all for, ‘I need help with something; I don’t know who to call,’ ” Clow told the TV station. He’s been a dispatcher for four years.
He said he was confused at first because the boy “had it backwards.”
The boy didn’t really want to divide 71 by 3,052.
He needed to divide 3,052 by 71.
Clow grabbed a calculator, he told the TV station.
“Just doing it on the calculator, it’s 42.98, which you would round up to like 43,” Clow told the boy.
“Oh, okay. Thanks. Thank you,” the boy replied.
“From an early age kids are taught to call police if they need help,” Police Services wrote on Facebook. “This particular problem wasn’t the kind we typically handle, but we’re glad Dispatch was able to help solve it.”
But it added a disclaimer: “Not all dispatchers are as skilled in math and/or readily equipped with calculators as Dispatcher Chris. Please only call 911 for emergencies.”
Funny as it was, this call is not without precedent.
The Bored Panda website rounded up the “stupidest calls” 911 operators have ever received and a request for homework assistance wouldn’t even rank as weird.
One dispatcher told the website he was ready to tell the woman who called about her cat being stuck in a tree that rescues like that only happen in the movies when she said, “so my husband climbed up to get the cat and now he’s stuck too.”
Another told the story of the “little old lady” who thought her house was being shot at. “Turns out she forgot about her eggs boiling on the stove and they exploded,” the dispatcher told Bored Panda.
And one dispatcher will never forget the woman who called in distress became men were in her house “trying to take her away,” the dispatcher told the website. “The men in question were police officers who had come to arrest her.”
This story was originally published September 27, 2018 at 12:40 PM.