Me: Nee Naw Service, what is the address of the emergency?
Him: Yes. (pause)
Me: Hello?
Him: Hello!
Me: What - is - the - ADDRESS - of - the - emergency?
Him: Yes please, my mum is not good.
Me: Where - do - you - live?
Him: Aaah… 8 Heath Road, London, NW8
Me: What is the phone number you are calling from?
Him: Yes, please!
Me: Tell - me - your - phone - number!
Him: NW8 9HG
Me: PHONE - NUMBER!
Him: Ah… 0208 898 1098 (and yes, he did put the 8 with the 020)
Me: What’s the problem with your mum? Tell me exactly what happened.
Him: Is not good. Not sleep all night.
Me: What’s wrong with her? Would you like an interpreter?
Him: No interpreter. Is not good!
Me: In what way is she not good? Does she have chest pains, breathing difficulties, the flu, stomach ache…
Him: IS NOT GOOD! Has eddack!
Me: Eddack??
Him: Yes! Her edd is not good. It ACKS!
Me: Her head is not good? It aches?
Him: Yes! That is what I said!
Me: Okay. I need to ask some questions. This won’t delay the ambulance at all. Are you with your mother now? How old is she? Is she conscious?
Him: I not understand!
Me: Would you like an interpreter?
Him: No, I not need. You just send ambulance.
Me: Is - she - conscious?
Him: What?
Me: Conscious? Awake?
Him: Walk? No, she cannot walk. Is too far.
Me: I think I will get the interpreter anyway. Which language do you speak?
Him: (cites an obscure African language)
Language Line: Hello, Language Line… which language please?
Me: [obscure African language]
Language Line: Oh dear, it might be a bit hard to get hold of a [that language] interpreter today. Caller, do you speak any other languages?
Him: Yes! I speak ENGLISH!!
Edit: I should point out that my pet hate is not foreigners, people with sick mothers or people who cannot pronounce “headache”. It is people who cannot swallow their pride and use one of our nice interpreters when one is needed, labouring on in English despite not understanding a word that I am saying.
October 4th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
We had a lot of people with limited english skills calling from nursing homes. One of the best was when my coworker was struggling to understand a caller who was screaming about chicken breath. She said did they have chicken for lunch? caller -”No chicken breath chicken breath” co-worker- ” Please try to speak a little slower” caller - “chicken breath chicken breath chi can breath she can’t breath she can’t breathe….”
October 5th, 2005 at 5:55 am
So, your pet hate is foreigners?
October 5th, 2005 at 10:51 am
Noooooo!! Certainly not! My pet hate is people who insist that they speak English even though it’s obvious that they can’t and refuse to use the interpreter thus delaying everything and sending frustration levels through the roof. There are times to practice your fledgling language skills and there are times to swallow your pride and ask for the interpreter!
*edits post*
October 6th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
I think your blogs are one of the funniest I’ve read (well done!) but… the address/phone number you’ve given? I hope they are made up and not the real ones or you could get yourself in a whole heap of trouble regarding patient confidentiality etc. If I ever had to make an emergency call I would hope that my details weren’t published on an open website.
Just a thought! Apart from that… keep blogging! :o)
October 6th, 2005 at 12:45 pm
JG — Don’t worry, all the locations/phone numbers/names/identifying details on this blog have been changed. I even checked in my map book to make sure there wasn’t a Heath Road in NW8!
October 6th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Cheers for the quick reply…great stuff! I’m a newbie to your blog (thanks to Random Reality) so wasn’t quite sure if you had changed them or not.
Keep posting!
October 23rd, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Curious about why 0208 is a problem compared to 020 8 ?
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:31 pm
Right. You asked for it. The code for London is 020. Not 0207 or 0208. Imagine you’re in London. You want to dial London Ambulance Switchboard. Since you are in London, you omit the area code. The number you should be dialling is 7921 5100. Now, if you are one of those terrible, awful, evil people who thinks the area code is 0207, the number you are dialling is 921 5100. This will get you NOWHERE! NOTHING! YOU WILL BE DEVOID OF CONTACT WITH OUR LOVELY SWITCHBOARD OPERATORS!!
… And the reason this makes me so mad is that the code has been like this for at least five years now, and still no-one has got it, and my idiotic former boss (not at the nee naw service) made me change a letter I was composing from “020 8xxx xxxx” to “0208 xxx xxxx” because, even after I explained that usage of 0208 is bad, wrong, and the moral equivalent of calling an ambulance for a papercut, she still wanted it because “it looks nicer”. UTTER MORON!!!!!! AAAARRGHHHHHH!!
(You did ask.)
October 24th, 2005 at 1:01 am
Aha! That all makes perfect sense. I haven’t lived “in town” since it was 01, and when 071 / 081 came along it was nice to narrow down, albeit slightly, the area where numbers came from. I suspect that that is what people are clinging onto…
November 6th, 2005 at 10:23 pm
Just thought i’d share a call I had recently from someone with limited english and the confusion it can cause.
The caller was from a part of Auckland with a lot of Islanders whose answer to every question is ‘eah and nah. Haveing extracted the address and ph no I asked what was wrong he replied ees got da sickness (another common chief complaint for this area) I then got the pts age and moved on to verifying consciousness and breathing (I was going to use 26 sickperson).
This is when it got interesting having got a response of nah on both questions I asked again rephrasing (remember limited english) is he awake can he talk to you, still the pt was unconscious and non breathing. so I sent the job as cardaic arrest finshed proqa and moved on to cpr instructions. The caller was doing quite well, positioned the pt gave the 2 breaths had seen the chest rise and was now doing compressions. When he came back to the phone I started to tell him to give two more breaths when he said “I cant do anymore” when I asked why “because he (the pt) sez it hurts too much”…..turns out the pt had abdo pain and refused transport, a lucky save.
January 11th, 2006 at 6:03 am
I wonder if you have ever been in a foreign country or if you speak another language. I hope you have never gone through such experience in your life, the experience of being sick in a foreign country where you have no idea about the services you may receive and being in desperate situation. It’s easier to be in the position of making fun of people rather than to undertand their situation
January 11th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
I think you misunderstand, Azad. London has huge numbers of people who don’t speak English very well, and most of them have the good sense to request an interpreter. We have access to interpreters for over a hundred languages. I am not making fun of foreign people, but expressing my annoyance at this individual, who was too proud to use an interpreter, thus holding up the call, delaying help getting to him and other people getting through. Secondly, he wasn’t in a foreign country — he lived here, and if you live in a country you should learn about their rules and services. As far as we could tell, his mother only had a headache, but we had to send him an ambulance because he refused to use an interpreter to give more details! This man was a timewaster and a bit of an idiot, and that is why he has become the subject of this post.
Secondly, I have been to several foreign countries and can speak four languages other than my own — not fluently, but enough to request an interpreter. I wouldn’t dream of even going on holiday without finding out a bit about how things work there, and if I were going to live in a foreign country I would make sure I took proper lessons in the language and found out all about their customs and services. I think it would be highly disrespectful to just trump up in someone else’s country without doing so.
May 9th, 2006 at 8:19 pm
Secondly, I have been to several foreign countries and can speak four languages other than my own — not fluently, but enough to request an interpreter. I wouldn’t dream of even going on holiday without finding out a bit about how things work there, and if I were going to live in a foreign country I would make sure I took proper lessons in the language and found out all about their customs and services. I think it would be highly disrespectful to just trump up in someone else’s country without doing so.
Well my dear the English type is the first disrespectful, this is your term.
I am Italian and I can tell you how many of you are walking around Milan talking to people expecting they speak your language just because is the first language in the world. English do not make much of an effort to speack foreign languages so why do you criticise all of us who do make it? I learned it through the hard way of people like you and I also went to school but it does not always work out that you get an interpreter when you need it and especially in an emergency situation. Do you think that maybe an interpreter should have been rranged by the person from the hospital maybe???????
Thank you for giving me the opp to say mine too!
May 9th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here. An English person who refuses to learn Italian is just as bad as an Italian who refuses to learn English, but I don’t see what that has to do with this post. Who do you mean by “the person from the hospital”? There weren’t any hospitals involved, just a very rude man who wanted an ambulance because his mother had a headache and refused to use an interpreter to explain why, because he thought he had some kind of divine right to an ambulance.