from the breaking-emergency-services dept
Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you have surely heard about AMC’s hit show Breaking Bad, featuring Bryan Cranston cosplaying Gordon Freeman while making a ton of drugs and generally being an all-around badass. Fortunately for this story, journalistic integrity doesn’t really include my opinion of the show, because I watch it enough that my dog and my fiancé can now recite the proper cooking method for a batch of blue crack-speed, which is a strange thing to hear from a dog, I have to tell you. Add to that AMC’s being rather awesome when disputes with Dish Network prevented subscribers from seeing it on their TVs and I have something of a fanboi relationship with the show.
And yet, if I had a cable subscription and it went on the fritz during the latest episode, I probably wouldn’t be on the horn with emergency services to get help like apparently everyone in Norwich, Connecticut was.
That’s what happened last night in southern Connecticut when affected Optimum Cable subscribers decided that missing an episode of Breaking Bad or Eat Drink Love was akin to suffering a major heart attack. Service was down for about two hours during primetime because of a power outage in Norwich.
Confused as to what to do and too impatient to wait until the next day, people started calling 911. That unsurprisingly pissed off emergency dispatchers.
The result of this pissing-off of dispatchers was for emergency services to engage their snark-emitters on social media, informing everyone that abusing 911 services could result in arrest and that they wouldn’t get cable in prison, either. Not bad, but I wonder how many of them had to resist the urge to dispatch SWAT to each and every caller to administer a bit of the old scared-straight tactic, because if my Gram-Gram needed an ambulance and couldn’t get one because someone’s cable was out, I’d be inclined to go full-psycho on them.
So, please, people of the world and, more importantly, Connecticut, don’t call for EMS because you can’t watch Breaking Bad. Instead, Gawker
offers a list of more productive activities you could engage in, such as swearing, eating a cookie, or maybe just wait until the morrow when AMC makes their episodes available on iTunes.
Filed Under: 911, breaking bad, cable service, police