Live data from Hacker News

My hell as a 911 operator

nypost.com

91–100 of 241 posts

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#91
post #69

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…

1. When people say "but what about monopolies?" they seem to forget that we do currently have a giant monopoly, which is government, that prohibits others from entering the market by force, not just by market instruments such as predatory pricing (although that's the case too, since it is claimed the price of government services is zero). Even if you disagree with me that monopolies historically never remained monopo…

1. The government monopoly, as broken as it is, should not discriminate in matters of health and safety, whereas a corporate system that you're proposing would. I am Canadian and am not interested in defending the American system. We have free healthcare (so long as you're a resident paying taxes, and others of course are billed after receiving care).

2. So, in your world, the guy who seemed to have alcohol on his breath can be left to die at a hospital. Sure. I think that's poor example, you'd be hard pressed to find doctors who would refuse to save a life in such a case. The reason I trot out grandma is because it is the poorest and weakest in our society that need protection the most, and your system would leave all that in the hands of some charity... hand-waving away all the issues that creates.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#92
post #79

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

Because if government bureaucrats "regulate" something that means it has to be good, right?

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#93
post #88

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…

What happens when grandma Jean forgets to pay her phone bill?

Hopefully grandma Jean notices her phones don't work prior to the heart-attack.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#94
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'm mostly glad to see a lot of reasonable responses to this.

This attitude is one of the reasons why so many people have such terrible experiences calling in to companies. I'm talking about companies that have nothing to do with real life emergencies and life threatening consequences.

Management tends to think "they just answer phones, so we can hire anyone, put them through a week of training and bam, they should be good to go, right?"

I work in a pretty standard e-commerce environment. I was in training for awhile, and now some data analysis and software development. It's like just about anything else. Predict how long you think it will take to competently train someone and triple it. It's not easy to get people ready to handle the majority of the calls you get in a call center, and it's really really hard to get them to handle the absurd number of one-offs you might have. Again, that's without even considering the number of call types and the weight of the calls I'd imagine 911 operators get, all while having to stay polite and calm.

Two months for a 911 operator in a major city like NY sounds kind of nutty to me, especially if the training is in the format I'm expecting it would be, and not something totally out of the box.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#95
post #73
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What are you talking about? Stop paying taxes and get all your public services from another entity?

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#96
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "

Why does website quality always seem to correlate so strongly with the company it's representing?

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#97
post #2

Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying? Sounds like a perfect storm. I'd love to see an itemization for $88 Million and how many vacation homes were bought.

> No one loses their job for someone dying?

They should. I think suing them over the deaths of hundreds of people and having the company that made this system go bankrupt is the very least they can do. Then the secret service can come in and crack some more necks. They got paid 88 million US dollars. For that you can make a system that Just Works or be honest up front if you can't get it done (on time).

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#98
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're proposing subscription-based private emergency services?

Why not? Telephone service itself is subscription-based. Nobody is required to have it.

When telephones were rarer you had public police phones available instead.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#99

Ok, I have something to add here for the following reasons: * I build big call centers for a living * I'm a really big Telecom Nerd You might be wondering why something as important as 911 is not automated or accessible via any other mechanism; why is it that the most critical service in the country runs on a system that hasn't materially changed since 1984? For one, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) is ex…

You mention Sprint as leading the charge and they've got issues of their own. I can't find an article at the moment, but Sprint is a provider of PTT/cell phone services to a local Portland, OR area police force and that police department is being forced to look for another vendor because Sprint has proven to be really, really unreliable.

Re: My hell as a 911 operator

#100

A lot of posts here talk about open source projects or the relative simplicity of implementing something like this at it's core: I agree with the idea though I understand that emergency systems require a high level of reliability similar to mil-spec hardware I imagine. If there was any justification for that price of 88+ mil, that would be it. Looks like that went right out the damn window. All systems have bugs, I t…

I recently attended a lecture about developing shutdown software for a nuclear power plant. The development process involved three key stages: Formal Requirements Documents, a Software Design Document, and finally, Coding. Each step in the process is accompanied by formal verification processes and an audit which produces a Hazard Analysis Report. Code also goes through code review and verification.

I wonder if Intergraph employed a testing plan quite as thorough.

Development cycle diagram: http://i.imgur.com/RaBSNHN.png (from the below PDF, page 4)

The entire paper: http://procon.bg/system/files/28.18_Lawford_Wassyng.pdf

Post reply on HN