Spider in bed prompts 999 call to firefighters

Firefighters have received emergency calls about a lost set of false teeth and a spider crawling onto a pillow.

London Fire Brigade revealed some of the strangest 999 calls in a bid to cut down on the number of non-emergency calls they receive.

Other calls included an elderly woman who asked for help after she threw water at fighting dogs, forgetting her dentures were in the glass.

The brigade said it had 100 unnecessary calls a week in the last year.

Stories like this always irritate me when you get some fecking eejit who dials 999 for the most inane reason, although I must admit while the old lady should have known better I did laugh quite a bit at why she made a needless 999 call.

Maybe in that situation the police could have just sent the police dog round on his own to break up the fight and send the two mutts on their way.

There is a list of the most ridiculous ones and they all boil the blood but the one that takes the top prize for idiocy is a woman who called 999 because she thought a fox in her garden might bite her because it had “an odd look on its face”.

This woman, or to correctly identify her oxygen thief, was presumably calling from inside the house so how would the fox bite her from the garden when she’s in the house? 

She said the fox had an odd look on its face, yeah it was probably thinking is that oxygen thief calling 999 because I’m in her garden what a nutcase.

Does this woman, sorry oxygen thief, call 999 every time she watches a David Attenborough documentary, hello yes there’s a rather menacing looking shark on my TV screen please send help my life’s in danger. 

    

I don’t mean to be the harbinger of doom, but I wonder how many people who genuinely needed help had to wait longer than necessary or worse still didn’t get the emergency help they needed because the emergency services were dealing with calls from morons asking for the firefighters because they burnt their toast?  

While the emergency services should obviously publish the details of these kinds of calls to show people the kind of lunatics they have to deal with, I think they should go a step further and name and shame them then hopefully they’ll be mocked by everyone they know and then hopefully they’ll learn not to be such idiots.

In fact maybe even go a step further than that and fine anyone who calls when it’s clearly not an emergency in fact when it’s not even anything, because the fire brigade had to deal with 100 unnecessary calls a week last year, that is a shocking number and it needs to stop because they’re hindering their ability to do their job properly.