Nelson: Unwitting 911 calls a pain in posterior

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While interviewing Mark Conrey on my cellphone, I accidentally hit a mute button on my Bluetooth headset, then accidentally turned the earpiece off, after which I yanked the device from my ear and picked up the cellphone so frantically to apologize that I simultaneously hit the Send button, the numbers 2 and 9 and the "pound" key.

Just the night before I made a similar cellphone blunder while driving. My front left pocket somehow unlocked my phone's keypad lock and called my oldest son.

This type of accidental cellphone call, although usually made from friction in a front pocket or purse, is most widely known as "butt dialing" or, also, as a "butt call."

Mark Conrey, the director of the Douglas County 911 center, is not a big fan of such calls.

"The butt calls have become a huge problem for us," said Conrey, who estimated that about 3,000 of the 35,000 calls made last month to the county's 911 emergency operators were accidental calls from cellphones.

While Conrey estimated that about 10 percent of emergency calls in Douglas County each year are accidental calls from cellphones, the director for Pottawattamie County's 911 call center, Bob Andersen, said that 15 to 20 percent of the calls his operators field are made by accident from cellphones.

"Now multiply the time we have to waste on those calls by about three times," Conrey said. "If that phone in your pocket accidentally called us, we have a duty to make sure it was an accident."

For example: If the operator continues to hear silence on the line, or, the person hangs up and doesn't answer the operator's attempts to call back, the operators have to assume somebody is in trouble.

So operators must get the GPS coordinates of the phone and have police or deputies go to that location to ensure someone isn't in danger.

Sometimes, that location leads to a building with multiple floors.

"With the technology right now," Andersen said, "we can't tell if the phone is on the first floor or the fifth floor. We only know the location in two dimensions, so that phone could be at any height."

If you haven't figured this out by now, this is a public-service announcement.

Basically, your local emergency-response personnel are begging you to make it more difficult for your pocket, purse or rear end to call them.

"I've called friends by accident. I think most everybody has done it," said Lt. Darci Tierney of the Omaha Police Department. "If those accidental calls go to 911, though, it really does cause a problem because it's our job to make sure someone isn't in trouble."

And, it's an increasing problem. More people carry the now-smaller phones in their pockets. More phones, particularly smartphones, have keypads on their surface, making them more vulnerable to accidental dialing. Some phones come with a feature allowing you to call 911 by simply holding down the number 9.

Some people disable the automatic key lock feature on their phones, assuming the phones even have them. Some people also program 911 to be speed-dialed with a single key, which, as Conrey noted, is a bit ironic "because the simple three-digit 9-1-1 was created precisely to make it easy to call."

If 911 operators receive an accidentally dialed call, Andersen said, "we're happy if we can hear mundane sounds."

"We get a lot of calls out of Council Bluffs where all you hear is the 'ding-ding-ding' of slot machines and other casino sounds," Andersen said. "We also have a lot of calls where we just have to hear people in their car singing to their favorite song on the radio.

"It's much easier to figure out what's happening when you can hear something going on in the background," he said.

It's been a long time since I've interviewed people who were so excited to offer tips to our readers.

Please, they begged. Make sure you have some sort of keypad locking system engaged.

Carry the cellphone in some manner that better shields any exterior keypad from unintentional pressure. For example, 911 operators miss the days of flip phones and belt-clip carrying cases, both of which made it harder to make accidental calls.

911 personnel are wary of saying this, but, well, come on:

It takes perhaps one second more to dial 9-1-1 and press send than it does to hit a single speed-dial number. The chances of misdialing with four key strokes, though, is obviously much lower than the chance of accidentally hitting one button.

Here's a big one:

If you do accidentally dial 911, Conrey said, "please, please stay on the line and tell us what happened."

Call back if you've already hung up. If you don't do that, at least answer the phone when the operator calls back and explain what happened.

"The more accidental calls we get," Conrey said, "the more it gets in the way of some very serious work that needs to be done.

"If people could be more careful, we would extremely grateful."

Sounds like the 911 people could use a nice Christmas gift.

Or, a New Year's resolution:

In 2012, I promise to work harder to keep my butt from calling people.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1129, robert.nelson@owh.com

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