When letting your fingers do the walking, please watch where you step.
Tripped-up dialers still are setting off the 911 emergency system, says Cindy Merritt, chief telecommunicator with University Police.
And what is merely an annoyance for both caller and 911 operator instantly becomes a problem if the caller hangs up before making it clear the call was the result of a slip of the finger, not an emergency, Merritt said.
"If you reach 911 by mistake, don't hang up," she said. "People need to stay on the line so that we can make sure they're OK. The key thing to us is just making sure everything's fine and that there's no emergency."
If a mistaken 911 caller hangs up and can't be reached with a return call by the police telecommunicator, an officer must be sent to the scene to make sure everything's OK. That ties up valuable police time, Merritt said.
When the 911 system went into operation last fall, police telecommunicators were getting about 1,500 calls per month from wayward fingers aiming for the 919 area code, residence hall 914 numbers and UNC Hospitals' 110 paging system.
Many people dialing a hospital page number make the mistake in thinking that they need to dial a 9 first, she said. As soon as someone dials that 9 and then begins the page number, they're connected to a 911 operator, she said.
The number of mistaken callers was 1,129 in February and down to 1,006 in March, she said.
Merritt said she's looking forward to April's numbers to see if a change to the phone system made by BellSouth helps.
Now when a person on campus mistakenly dials 911, the line will not be disconnected when the caller hangs up the phone, Merritt said. The police telecommunicator will be on that line if the caller picks up the that line to redial, she said.
Merritt said many people are upset or even frightened when they hear that they accidentally have reached a 911 operator.
"There's no need for that," she said. "Just say it was an error and we will gladly let you go."
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