Friday, September 05, 2008

911

My son made a 911 call on Monday. I'm a bit liberal when it comes to letting my son run the house while mom is out. Whether it's the TV controls, remote control, plants, cloths baskets (with folded cloths), phones, etc., I let him play with them up until the point where he could cause injury. He's a boy and that is what boys are suppose to do.

Out of all the things he shouldn't have, he really likes phones. Even at 13 months he understands that a phone is placed next to one's ear and then softly babbled into. At least he and I babble. Mom's a bit of a rigid shouter on the phone.

Anyway, to make a long story short, he mistakenly punched in 911 (along with an additional, long string of numbers) and hit Talk. How it hit Talk is still a mystery as it doesn't make as many cool sounds as the digits 0-9 do. I heard a lady on the other end say "911, do you have an emergency?" Knowing we didn't, I grabbed the phone and apologized profusely. She wasn't overly nice, but understood that accidents happened. She then said the cops will be showing up to make sure we were all right.

The cops never showed up (that would have been embarrassing), but they did call. I had to give him my personal details to close out the police report. Apparently they open a report as soon as a call comes in. That must be different from Minneapolis. While a resident in Uptown, I called 911 after a truck drove through my lawn and the neighbor's lawn. No one ever followed up with me then.

Mom got wind of this all and unfortunately no more phone for my son. However, I still let him play with my cell phone, which has a protective flip cover.

1 comment:

Scooter said...

I gave Eryn one of our old cell phones with no charge. If you don't want him to dial 911, teach him a number he can call obsessively that isn't 911, like the number for a brother you want to drive nuts.