The problem with anecdote collection as a tool to compare to across eras is the pre-social media pre-internet pre-wireless world had 911 problems, but they&#x27;ll never be documented and are lost in the ether.  Did my deceased for 20 years grandma have problems connecting via 911 when calling an ambulance for my deceased for 30 years grandfather?  Well, maybe, but who will ever know?<p>However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy.  All of them.  Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails.  Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about.<p>There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones.  No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn&#x27;t have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...)<p>I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency.  The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.