The television programme 999 What's Your Emergency? has been enlightening us recently on the brutality and banality that first responders in Blackpool have to deal with.
Broken Britain is there for all to see, with ambulance workers talking about the inevitability of having to wear stab-proof vests as violence, in particular knife attacks, increase. At the other end of the spectrum is the inanity of some of the calls the emergency service call centre gets: as one phone operator may be giving instructions on how to do CPR another is telling a caller not to ring the equivalent of 111 because your girlfriend has run off with the X-Box or you can't get the TV to work.
The volume of 999 calls in Britain has jumped by 60 per cent in the past generation, with 31 million received in 2011. Over there it seems the service has become a kind of Citizens Advice Bureau on steroids, with a bit of Bart Simpson thrown in.
There is some talk in Britain about charging for emergency calls because the services are so stretched by answering ridiculous requests among the crises.
It's safe to say the New Zealand ambulance services are a lot more prosaic.
