Cerebral Soup - The Archives
110
000 in Australia. 911 in the United States. Thanks to the Santa Clara County Fire Dept website here is a list of almost all of them.
Well anyway in Japan it's 110. And last week the operators at the emergency services received over an extra 6,000 calls in one day.
But it wasn't because there were 6,000 extra robberies, accidents or incidents. It was because a mobile telephone company didn't think through things properly enough. Oh and people of the general public being silly.
AU/KDDI had been tweaking their system and decided to refer to one type of mail sending error with the ID number "110". So 6,000-odd people who failed to send mail and got that error assumed that they should call 110. Which they did. And then the operators at 110 probably head-desked a few hundred times each.
It wouldn't occur to me to call emergency services even if the error message ID I got was that number. What went through their minds? "Oh noes I got the ULTIMATE DESTRUCTO ERROR! The world is in danger! I must call emergency services and confess! Oh woe what have I done??!!??"
So after this fiasco AU/KDDI changed the error number ID. Let's hope they double check the error IDs on their global roaming phones. Maybe I should send them the link to the Santa Clara County Fire dept site so they can double check.....
Posted by mjd-s on November 27, 2006 3:56 PM