Your Turn winner! Ty Heimerl, "911 -- Don't call it for fun"

By Ty Heimerl

About 10 minutes after I had made the call, we both heard the doorbell ring. I think that we both just about wet our pants when we saw a police officer standing at our front door.

Editor’s note: Ty Heimerl has won our first-place prize for the Your Turn Contest: “What’s the biggest mess you’ve ever made?” Congratulations Ty!

At age six, I was an average and clueless little kid. I didn’t understand many things, and was still figuring out the world. One day, my older brother Joe was doing the one thing that annoyed me the most: he was taking my Pokemon cards from my deck.

Of course I was going to do something about it, and I did. I warned him that I was going to call the police on him if he didn’t return every last card to my deck that he had taken.

Being the stubborn older brother that he was, he took his chances and kept taking cards from me. With the tears gathering in my eyes, I grabbed the phone, and began to dial the number.

Slowly, I dialed 9-1-1, and waited a few seconds. When he saw that I had actually dialed the number, he did what any other normal person would have done and grabbed the phone and hung it up immediately.

I thought that I was safe, but I was soon to be mistaken when a police officer showed up at my door! Before the officer had arrived, there were two phone calls to my house. When the phone rang the first time I answered it.

“Hello,” I said, but there was no answer and I hung it up. Not even one minute later, the phone rang a second time. This time, Joe decided to answer the phone. This time there was an answer. The person on the line said, “911, what is your emergency?”

As soon as he heard that, he slammed the telephone down on the hook. We both knew that we were in for a world of trouble, but it was double for me.

About 10 minutes after I had made the call, we both heard the doorbell ring. I think that we both just about wet our pants when we saw a police officer standing at our front door.

To make matters even worse, our 7-pound Jack Russell Terrier bit the officer in the leg. Things weren’t looking good for us.

My dad answered the door, and the police officer said that he had reveived a call from our house, and was wondering what the emergency was.

My dad, who was clueless, thought this was just a mistake. He asked us if we knew anything about it, and we wisely confessed. Luckily, the officer didn’t press charges for being attacked by our dog.

In the end, we both wrote apology letters to the officer, and explained why what we did was wrong. We also had to do extra chores for a month with no allowance. It was torture.

We both learned our lesson.