Warming Up

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Wednesday 9th November 2005

I was very disappointed to see that the fourth anniversary of 9/11 went completely unremarked upon in the media. How soon they forget.

I recorded some bits for a topical BBC3 show called "The Comic Side of Seven Days" this afternoon. I had to talk about six or seven news stories from my trademark slightly unusual angle.
My favourite story was about police response times to 999 calls. One man claims that he rang 999 to complain about his car being vandalized and it took the police four months to come round. Which sounds bad, but to be fair to the police they were working under the misapprehension that the car had been vandalized by a gang of snails. There was a mistake when the call was written down. If that had been the case they would almost certainly have been in time to make an arrest.
There were several bad statistics about the inefficiency of the emergency response times, but it became clear reading on that the fault actually lies with the feckless British public. Because the call centres are swamped every year with calls from thousands of idiots who misunderstand the term emergency. For example and these are true, a teenager rang up to say he’d missed his bus and he needed a lift home, a man called 999 because he had received an electricity bill, but he had already paid it and one woman rang the police because she was having trouble turning on her TV. It made me think there should be a separate emergency number for thick people. We should all have to take an exam to test if we are clever or thick and anyone who fails is told that if they ever have an emergency they ring, I don’t know, let's say 666 (they will be stupid and thus not understand the significance of this number)but the line is manned by a pigeon (in India, as Indian birds demand less birdseed in return for their time). As they register their stupid call the bird will just coo reassuringly down the line at them. Occasionally this will mean a thick person is going to be in a real emergency and probably be killed or hurt in some way, but better that than having an intelligent person harmed because the police are out turning on someone’s TV. The stupid must learn…. But they won’t. That’s the intrinsic problem.