Post by Andy Burnsit was only a few years ago that I learned that if you receive an
incoming call, you can hang up and *then* go to another extension to
continue the call.
You probably have to unlearn that; to prevent various scams, BT now
support called party clearing after about 10 seconds on-hook, rather 3
minutes.
It's a good thing that they have changed it. Having to do the little "dance"
to transfer a call to another phone is a small price to pay for preventing
the caller blocking the line.
It can be serious if the calling person collapses while on the phone and you
can't ring 999 to get an ambulance to them. This happened in the 1990s when
my grandma called me late at night; her voice was slurred (she never drank!)
and she wasn't making a lot of sense, and said something about not being
able to feel anything with one hand.
Sounded like the classic symptoms of a minor stroke (as indeed it turned out
to be). During the call, there was a thump and she stopped talking.
And thanks to the very long timeout, I wasn't able to dial 999 from my
phone. I eventually had to go next door and do it from there - this was in
the days before I had a mobile.
It took the ambulance operator a surprisingly long time to cotton on to the
idea that I was summoning an ambulance to a *different* address, nowhere
near where I was calling from. They seemed to be intent on getting all my
details (name, address) instead of taking my grandma's details since that
was where the ambulance was required. (*)
Fortunately by the time the ambulance arrived, she'd recovered a bit and had
had the foresight to unlock the front door in case I'd worked out that she
needed an ambulance. She recovered, but as with so many old people, the
shock seemed to affect her confidence and was no longer able to look after
herself so she had to go into a nursing home - where she lived for another
few years, and died of old age and general senility, rather than the acute
effects of the stroke.
(*) I have to say that almost every time I've phoned 999 to report crashed
cars etc, the operators have seemed fairly clueless. There was one occasion
when I saw, through my rear-view mirror, a crash happen on the opposite
carriageway of the motorway, so I rang 999 from my mobile (hands free) and
told them that the collision was on the northbound carriageway of the M1,
and that I'd just passed location sign "M1 A 123.4" (or whatever), so the
accident was about half a mile north of there, and I stressed "on the
opposite carriageway". They faffed around with "what's the postcode" (as if,
on a motorway!), what junction or service area had I just passed etc (no
idea - I hadn't been paying attention because it was nowhere near the start
or end of my journey on the motorway). I offered to stop and read the number
on the little 100-metre post or else on one of the motorway phones, but they
still wibbled on about "what's the postcode". I reported this to the
relevant police force, because it was evidently a training issue: the "M1 A
123.4" signs are there specifically for the public to report locations on a
motorway in an emergency, but this operator didn't know what to do with that
information. I hope the emergency services were actually summoned and sent
to the right place.
