MA Town Stumped When British Woman Dials Wrong Emergency Hotline

[Initech]

BARNSTABLE (CBS) — It took a woman calling Barnstable Police to report a reckless driver a few minutes to realize she’d called authorities on the wrong continent.

The caller phoned police in the Cape Cod town last Thursday–but she was actually calling from Barnstaple, a town in Devon, England, over 3,000 miles away.

In the call above, Officer Mark McWilliams, the Barnstable Police dispatcher, struggles to understand exactly where the woman is calling from. She mentions the towns of Ilfracombe and Muddiford, which he’s never heard of.

“You’re not local, are you?” the woman asks at one point. “Because Ilfracombe is the next town over from Muddiford.”

In the end, McWilliams figures out that she’s calling from across the pond.

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2016/09/20/barnstable-police-call-england/

How does that happen?

Though I did like the response from the officer on duty: “Our response time is gonna be about six hours,”

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. " after using Windows 'digital assistant' Ask Cortana"

"My friends asked Cortana and the phone number came up so I pressed it and that's how I was speaking to police in Massachusetts."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-37418691

Officer McWilliams said in a BBC interview that they have an English worker at their police department, so at first he thought it was a prank by them.