Home break-ins or simply invasion attempts can be frightening for anyone, especially when your loved ones’ safety is compromised. Usually, calling 911 to request a local patrol visit can be reassuring, but peace of mind is not what Georgia resident Dylan Johnson got when he made an emergency call to report someone breaking into his home. Instead, what he got was a dispatcher casually ordering McDonald’s for breakfast while on the phone.
“Mhmm…McGriddle…mhmm *coughs* I’m sorry, what?” was the 911 dispatcher’s startling response to Johnson after his third attempt for someone to pick up the phone. “I really couldn’t believe it. If it didn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t believe that it had happened to someone else. That’s how unbelievable it was,” he told WTOC. Johnson was at work around 9:30 am when he made the call; his wife informed him that a suspicious individual was “snooping around the house, knocking on the doors and banging on windows and stuff.”
When the police eventually arrived, the suspect had already left. However, the Georgia husband and father was still very much shaken by the event, especially regarding how the 911 dispatcher responded to a home invasion call. “They should treat everything as an emergency as it should be,” Johnson said, criticizing the person who decided to respond and order their breakfast at the same time. Needless to say, Reddit found the situation both shocking and hilarious.
“Homer Simpson vibes,” quips a top commenter on the story’s Reddit post. “I mean, it was McGriddle; if it was just a sausage biscuit, I could see the uproar,” reads another comment. A third chimes in, saying, “I mean, if someone in the office is taking orders, I’m gonna ask for something. Gotta eat right.” Hundreds of other users upvote in agreement comments that say how, even though the call might be the worst moment in someone’s life, the dispatchers still have to get fed.
“I think our society as a whole needs to step down on holding people to crazy standards,” says a commenter, to which they would be right. While many Redditors acknowledge the dispatcher’s mistake, they are just a normal person with needs just like the rest of us. The best way to process this sort of event would be to look at it from both sides. As one user puts it: “On the one hand, if you’re calling 911, you’ve got a major emergency, presumably, and want help immediately. However, for the operator, it’s just another Tuesday.”
