28 | January | 2015 | Words, By George!

FaceBook

Following a surprising amount of phone calls to 911 emergency services last night (27/01/2015), East Bay dispatchers near San Francisco are requesting that local residents stop calling in to complain about social media networks becoming unavailable.

Claycord.com reports that following a brief Instagram outage, Facebook also went down, causing panic among several residents.

Facebook’s outage was reportedly caused by an internal glitch, but nevertheless raised concern in the East Bay, prompting five people to call in to ask when the sites would be back online.

“Our lines are dedicated to handling life and death calls, and even though Facebook is important to a lot of people, it’s not a matter of life and death when it stops working,” the dispatcher said. “One caller even called back to tell me I was being rude because I told her it wasn’t a life threatening emergency.”

I used to say only in America, but judging by the type of calls we recieve in Australian emergency call centres, it’s happening here too!

It has never ceased to amaze me how football (soccer, in Australian parlance) has always been the poor cousin of Australian sport. Many other forms of “football” have greater attendances. These include rugby league, rugby union and Australian Rules football.

Football, commonly regarded as “the world game”, although played widely throughout the country at junior levels, fails to attract and support the game at national and international level. The Hyundai A-League has gone some way to putting Australian football on the national stage, but the competition supports only ten teams, and one of those is from New Zealand! I would have thought that ther national competition could have supported more teams. The English Premier League supports 20 teams, 4 other divisions or leagues and two Scottish divisions. Any talented player in Australia must seek an overseas club to play for if they are getting to make a decent living from the sport

Of course all that has changed now that Australia is a finalist in the Asian Cup. Australians are now experts on everything “soccer”, as they throw their “lot” in with the national side. Should they win against South Korea on Saturday next, Australians will see this an excuse for the consumption of large quantities of alcohol, increased absenteeism from work as they enjoy an additional albeit unauthorised public holiday, the sickie.

After a week or so, apathy toward the sport will return, especially as the rugby league season draws near, and national football will again suffer from reduced attendance, and return to its poor cousin status.