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My hell as a 911 operator

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Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#71

Post by ErikAugust »

hga wrote: post #62
ErikAugust wrote: post #47

"...and Intergraph [the Alabama company that designed the new system]." http://www.intergraph.com/ - Flash header on company's homepage hangs on Chrome. Not a good start.

They used to be a really hot hardware and I think software (e.g. CAD) company, even did a lot of Chipper RISC chip work ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_architecture ; not to be confused with the Clinton administration cryptographic debacle). Then they exited the hardware business in 2000 and among other things became a patent troll: https://www.google.com/search?q=intergraph+lawsuit Which of course is an even…

At least they have been keeping their website's copyright up to date:

" © Copyright "

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#72

Post by loopdoend »

barnabask wrote: post #59
loopdoend wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would of course tie in with the private police force and private fire service, right? And when the customers stop paying and sue the company into oblivion, who handles the calls? Do you prevent monopolies from forming so no one company becomes responsible for all 911 call traffic? That doesn't sound very libertarian to me. Let's presume we're interfacing with public services here, just for shits and giggles. Wha…

Here's an example of that kind of situation happening for a fire department in Tennassee: http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/10/04/122193/county-f...

That policy is about as backwards and fucked up as the idea of privatizing a 911 service. Those "firefighters" should be ashamed.

As a counterpoint, I refer you to all the other counties in the US where receiving this vital service isn't contingent on your bills being paid. I can see these people losing their home to a fire because they failed to acquire home insurance, but I can't see how moral people would stand by and let a house burn to the ground over an unpaid bill.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#73

Post by snitko »

bhousel wrote: post #58
snitko wrote: post #37

Now imagine for a moment 911 line was a private company. People subscribe to it, pay a monthly fee, call it, wait to get through and don't receive help in time. What do you think people would do then? Stop paying and likely file a lawsuit. Good luck doing this with a government.

You absolutely can sue the government if their responders fail in their job and someone is hurt or dies. This happens all the time.

Can you also stop paying and subscribe to a different service provider?

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#74

Post by tomjen3 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #10

Pre-9-11, I spent some time doing some high-level analysis, talking to users and administrators, of a nation-wide EMS system for an entire country (Sorry, can't say which) It was a U.S. firm interested in figuring out exactly how much it would cost to create a national system so they could bid on it. This does not have to be a very complicated system at all. It's basically a real-time workflow system. Information com…

So this is basically something that can either be made with 100 usd for pizza and diet coke or 100 billion? Makes sence, we should probably make more of the first kinds of systems.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#75

Post by hga »

gregd wrote: post #55
doorhammer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the call center branch of a fairly large corporation. Obviously we're not saving lives and dispatching fire trucks, but for some reason it seems like we're dead set against doing incremental rollouts and user testing in any meaningful way. Don't get me wrong, I see things get to user testing phases and we have reasonable ways of logging bugs and problems, but almost every project I've seen had kept on truck…

"but almost every project I've seen had kept on trucking to meet an arbitrary deadline regardless of how poorly any of the testing goes, then the system hits the floor" And the reason for this is simple..the one person who can pull the plug on a project of this magnitude, won't. Simply because s/he doesn't want to have to answer to having already dropped 88 million with nothing to show for it. There becomes a single…

Even worse, this is a small, at least in $$$ part of a $2 billion total upgrade of emergency services. And it's the "customer's" entry into the rest of those systems.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#76

Post by lmm »

tomsaffell wrote: post #13
richardv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how things work... You can't just create some system and see governments flock to you. There are years of consulting and specification requirements. Linux is open source... Office Libre... Go convince a public office to switch to Ubuntu.. Saving money is often at the bottom of their focus.. and then you have competing interests releasing figures that show it is more costly to switch to free alternatives. P…

>There are years of ... Yes, First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Sorry, I know it's trite, but there's some truth there. Being ignored for years is not necessarily a reason not to do something. In some cases it's the very best reason to do it. [EDIT] - would those people down-voting please explain why?

I downvoted you because you asked people to explain why they were downvoting you. This adds nothing to the conversation (everyone who gets downvoted wants to know why, everyone who downvotes knows that the person who they are downvoting would want to know why) and is bad for HN (talking about the moderation system distracts from actual on-topic conversation, and leads to gaming of the moderation system - indeed, I would say even that line can be gaming the moderation system, as it can lead people to reconsider whether to downvote).

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#77

Post by arkades »

300bps wrote: post #30

Holy hyperbole. Definitely seems like this worker is frustrated beyond sense or has an agenda with saying things like: They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw ’em in. They’re not ready. Two months training is not enough training? This is implausible. At its core, they're answering the phone, determining the reason for a call and typing information from the call into a computer. They'…

I've done Lean work for hospital new patient intake centers. When it comes to triaging patients in extremely homogenous centers, the real training period is a few months long (formally it's one month, but that's really just to learn your way around the computer systems). In disease centers where the patients are calling with heterogenous complaints, the formal training period is also a month, but everyone agrees the real training period is just about two years plus weekly meetings with docs to learn about how to triage that week's oddball/edge cases.

I suspect 911 calls are no less complex than scheduling people for a doctor's appointment.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#78

Post by GigabyteCoin »

gregd wrote: post #44
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #39

The sensationalism is high in this article. Operators had to record 911 calls with pen and paper I know I work all day on a computer but I wouldn't consider using pen and paper a hindrance.

Have you ever been in a 911 call center? Many, many, many things are computer driven, not the least of which is interfacing with the various agencies one may have to deal with on a per call basis. Then there's "whose jurisdiction is this"? Kind of hard to determine with pen and paper. Who's dispatched to what? Who's covering which stations now? How many calls are in the queue? The list goes on and on. Having to recor…

I'm just saying that 20 years ago handwriting was the only option, and police still managed to get the job done.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#79

Post by dotBen »

nostromo wrote: post #60

What if we made 911 into a voucher program. When signing up for a phone, you must pick a 911 provider. The cost is fixed, so you're not choosing based on saving money, but based on quality of service. Each provider would be audited and would publish response times, etc. You could choose the government program described in this article, or go with someone more technologically advanced.

Because the beneficiary of the 911 provider isn't likely to be you, it's the person who needs the emergency who probably can't come to the phone.

If someone needs to call 911 for me, I want to know it's regulated and up to quality - not based on whether the person who happened to pick their provider actually bothered to research a good one, etc

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#80

Post by nostromo »

dotBen wrote: post #79
nostromo wrote: post #60

What if we made 911 into a voucher program. When signing up for a phone, you must pick a 911 provider. The cost is fixed, so you're not choosing based on saving money, but based on quality of service. Each provider would be audited and would publish response times, etc. You could choose the government program described in this article, or go with someone more technologically advanced.

Because the beneficiary of the 911 provider isn't likely to be you, it's the person who needs the emergency who probably can't come to the phone. If someone needs to call 911 for me, I want to know it's regulated and up to quality - not based on whether the person who happened to pick their provider actually bothered to research a good one, etc

Did the system described in the article sound like a good one to you?

Mandated monopolies have a way of discouraging innovation and depressing quality.

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