According to Wikipedia, “999 is an official emergency telephone number in a number of countries which allows the caller to contact emergency services for emergency assistance“, with approximately 35 million calls being made per year.
The English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.) uses the emergency number to provide a certain number of emergency services – ambulance, fire brigade, police and coastguard being the main ones, as well as – depending on location – lifeboat, mountain rescue, cave rescue, mine rescue and bomb disposal.
However, and this is quite a significant however, one of the services not offered is advising the hard of thinking where they can get a haircut in the wee small hours, as the Bristol Post duly reported after reading Avon & Somerset Constabulary’s social media feed on X, formerly known as Twitter before man-baby Elon Musk spent his pocket money on the company.
The post reads:
999 call: Caller has stated he is in an emergency, as his local barbers are closed at 01:00am. Upon reflection, the caller agreed that it is unlikely that any barbers would be open at this time, and that this was not a Police matter.
The tweet was sent by Mr Plod as part of International Control Room Week which aims to highlight the work done by people working in 999 control rooms across the emergency services.