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In May 2014, a thread in the popular AskReddit subreddit sought feedback from 911 dispatchers on the one call they could never forget, with one participant contributing the following: While 911 operators often have experience ranging from funny to harrowing, one comment in the thread stood out against more than about 5,000 others. In October 2014, that one comment crossed over and began appearing on high-profile blogs, prompting interest in its veracity. The original story was indeed compelling. The 911 dispatcher who posted it (Reddit user Crux1836) related a tale of a domestic violence victim's subverting her attacker by pretending to order a pizza after calling emergency services: It's not precisely clear why or how that user's story crossed into news reports five months after it was posted. In the same discussion thread, the man who posted it came back to acknowledge he'd seen his comment published on news sites but didn't know why it was picked up as new. BuzzFeed profiled the story in a 29 October 2014 article and interviewed an individual claiming to be the original poster. The man, Keith Weisinger, provided additional details about the 911 pizza call and said he had no information about the woman's fate following the incident: This call occurred almost 10 years ago, he said. I worked the graveyard shift, 6pm-6am, and I remember this call being pretty late — close to midnight. Weisinger said the woman — who he believed was in her 30s — was calm at first, but gave short, hurried responses. I remember feeling relieved we had an officer close by who could respond quickly, he added. Weisinger said he never found out what happened to the woman after she called: While Weisinger hasn't been widely acknowledged in circulated accounts of the 911 pizza call, he was awarded Reddit gold by fellow site users for his contribution to the thread. It's very likely Weisinger is the individual responsible for sharing the tale on Reddit, but it's difficult to verify whether or not the incident in question occurred as relayed by him without additional detail. Others have expressed skepticism about the veracity of his story, however, noting that the very same scenario was used in a public service announcement for the Norwegian Women's Shelter Association back in 2010: On 26 January 2015, another public service announcement inspired by the story was published to YouTube with the following description: In December 2017, we came across a new version of the pizza/911 story: The source of this message was unclear, but its use of 999 instead of 911 suggested that the forward originated outside the United States. What began as a story of ingenuity in the face of danger evolved into a purported code by which anyone caught in a dangerous situation was able to summon help safely, and the share to save a life suggestion incited users to spread the dubious directive on social media. Like other bits of lore promising a clever way out of an otherwise potentially hopeless situation, the pepperoni pizza advice is problematic. It makes a sweeping claim that dispatchers are trained to understand the purported code in the message, an assertion quite likely based solely on inferences drawn from the original story. We have not been able to determine whether dispatchers are aware of the original legend or trained to recognize cloaked pleas as something other than a prank call, so we cannot at this time endorse it as a course of action if any other options for calling for help are available to you. However, we hesitate to endorse doing nothing if you are in immediate danger.
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