Have you thanked a 911 dispatcher this week?

Because, honestly, if you haven’t, you might want to consider it. I know when I heard the following recording, I thanked the next 911 dispatcher I talked to, which happened to be Rick at the Dane County 911 Center.

The recording comes to us courtesy of our friends at the Dodge County Sheriff’s Department. The story’s actually a couple weeks old, and I meant to post on it then, but I was busy with other things (like trying to get this new website together, for starters). But the audio is so golden, and there’s so much more to be taken away from this morality tale, that I think it warrants a bit of our time, even two weeks after the fact.

The set-up is simple, really, and happens all the time in agricultural Wisconsin. A handful of cows escaped their enclosure in rural Dodge County. Where normally a farmer would have called up some relatives and neighbors to come out and help chase them back in (and yes, I’ve been a part of one of these “posses”), this woman instead dialed 911 and asked the operator to send out the cavalry.

When she was told that sheriff’s deputies had bigger fish to fry on this particular day, she tried another strategy, and was far from gracious when it failed. Note: this version of the call is UNCENSORED.

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When your career is centered on helping other people, I imagine it’s really frustrating to come across someone who so stubbornly refuses to help herself.

Sadly, these kinds of calls are not at all uncommon for the folks on the other end of the 911 line. It’s like there’s a segment of humanity that believes calling 911 is an automatic solution to any problem, big or small. Just last March, a Madison woman called the 911 center to report an idling car on the street outside her home, when she could have just as easily peaked inside it and potentially saved a man from carbon monoxide poisoning.

When I worked in Portage, Columbia County Sheriff Dennis Richards told me about a car accident on a snowy stretch of road where a carload of three high-schoolers was killed instantly. In the sport utility vehicle that became fused to the car’s driver’s side, a Baraboo man and his wife sat, injured and trapped in their vehicle. The Columbia County 911 center took several calls from other motorists reporting the accident, but only one of them stopped to help. When the state patrol got to the scene to investigate the cause of the crash, they estimated about a dozen cars had driven AROUND the accident, destroying the evidence investigators had hoped to photograph on the shoulder.

There were people who showed up to help that snowy afternoon on Highway 33 — a neighbor who was fortunately a doctor, a couple of drivers who were eventually waved down to help. But in speaking with the Sheriff about it weeks later, he told me that the number of people who actually stop and offer help has dropped off steeply in the past decade.

“A lot of people feel like they’ve done their part just by notifying law enforcement of an emergency, and nowadays they can do that with a cell phone,” Richards told me. “They don’t have to stop or pull into a house or business… They can keep right on driving.”

Having that extra set of eyes and hands at the scene of a crash, or any other emergency, can be a big help to first responders. Richards encourages those who are so inclined to offer rudimentary first aid, hold hands, reassure the victims that help is on the way and distract or shield them from any carnage.

Those with less stomach for an active role can still be of assistance by directing traffic away from the area and by staying on the line with 911 operators, giving them a play-by-play of the scene so first responders know what to expect when they arrive. A good informant at the scene of an emergency can help dispatchers figure out how many ambulances to call, if the scene is safe to approach directly and whether to page out Medflight.

“There are a lot of questions that can be answered if the phone call is made right there (from the scene),” Richards told me at the conclusion of our conversation on the topic.

Dialing 911 is not the end-all, be-all solution to every problem that crops up, though it’s often a necessary part of the fix. In some cases, people utilize 911 as a crutch, abusing the system for their own benefit and draining resources that could potentially save a life if put to better use. Other times, 911 becomes a comfortable way for people to feel like they’ve done their civic duty without really getting their hands dirty.

In either case, people need to stop being so personally helpless and start taking a more active responsibility in their own welfare and the well-being of those around them… and remember that 911 operators have feelings too.