Emergency...sort of

by Angelique Parker

definition

The word "emergency" has lost its meaning where cellular phones are concerned. Instead of calling to say, "Someone here is bleeding profusely," what you get is, "Should I wear my blue shirt or my red shirt tonight?" Since when is color scheme dubbed an emergency?

One of the first lessons I ever learned from my father, a veteran police officer, was what an emergency was. "If the house is on fire," he would say, "that is an emergency." "If anyone in this house requires serious medical attention for any number of idiotic reasons, that is an emergency." (For the record, there were at least eight idiotic reasons, but that's another story for another time.) "If, however, you and your brothers are in a brawl or someone is doing something they shouldn't, that is NOT an emergency." After that conversation, there was never any question in my mind of what an actual emergency was.

Time passed and the world was taken by storm with electronic pagers. The code for an emergency was "911". Of the five people who had my pager number, four of them caused me grief at my job over non-emergency "911" calls. Oddly enough, the first of those incidents was caused by my father, Mister "if it's not bleeding there's nothing wrong with it" Himself. I got an "emergency" page just fifteen minutes after starting work for the day. I dropped what I was doing to call home, only to have my father say, "I just wanted to know if you were going to be home for dinner or not."

Our society technologically progressed once more, and cellular phones became the cat's meow. In my simple-minded logic it seemed that having a cell phone would save me from scraping change together out of my car console in the middle of nowhere to call people back. Little did I know it was just an easier way for people to ask ridiculous questions at inconvenient times. My mother once called me in the middle of a doctor's appointment just to ask what I was doing. An ex boyfriend once left me a message of dire importance on my voicemail. After getting up from a family dinner to return his call, he asked me why I wouldn't reconsider our relationship. (Not so coincidentally, things like that were precisely the reasons.)

Now that I am a mother of three and have been through a few emergencies with them (i.e. a tumble down the stairs, a split open head from tripping and falling into a toilet, and so on and so forth with the toddler accidents), it befuddles me to think how even their fathers could have trouble determining an emergency from a non-emergency. Our agreement is that unless there is an emergency on the days dads have the kids, mom is not to be called (unless by the children for chatting purposes).

On a Saturday night around ten o'clock, when the children should be long since in bed, the twins' dad called me to see what I was "up to". I was bartending a full bar at peak time, and there was no loss of sleep to the kids, let alone blood. One Sunday afternoon I got an emergency message to call about my son. I called within about three minutes, only to find that the urgency was based on the fact that my son was coughing and had a stuffy nose.

"Should I give him some medicine or something?"

At this point in my life, with so much more inevitably to come, I can't help but sympathize with 911 dispatchers. But, as one man's trash is another man's treasure, so is one man's crisis another man's butt of a joke.