EMT Phone Home

Call it a wish for the party never to end or a less noble desire to pull some unsuspecting sleeping sober person into your drunken, maniacal world, but, for whatever reason, picking up the phone at 3am while so drunk you stink of it often seems like a good idea at the time. The urge to drink and dial, apparently, affects folks in all professions including those who should -- even when they spend an evening up-turning tequilas and slowly building up a pile of lime rinds around them -- know better.An off-duty (in every sense of that term) emergency medical technician in Staten Island broke one of the main rules surrounding her very profession – one that every parent who does not fetch their child’s lunch from the couch cushions knows: do not crank call 911 emergency services.

The lady in question did just this, calling in a phony assault complaint against the bartender who took her keys in order to prevent her from giving lessons in interpretative driving on Staten Island’s roads. Unhappy with the service she received, the wronged woman then went on to her emergency band radio, tuned it to an NYPD frequency, and gave everyone who was listening at that time a lecture on the myriad inadequacies of Staten Island law enforcement. Having thus shamed Staten Island’s best (or confused NYPD’s) she then went on to find a payphone and make three crank calls to 911, two reporting a jumper in Lower New York Bay, and a third saying that a man with a knife had taken her purse.

The former two calls, not surprisingly, resulted in a huge FDNY and police turnout, which, had their been a drowning man, would have been a good thing. Police traced the calls and found the EMT, apparently out of quarters, at the payphone from which she had made the last call. (Full story here)