Just a year later, residents in the San Francisco Bay area were at it. Five different people rang up 911 to find out when Facebook would be back online, prompting dispatchers to beg everyone to please leave their lines open for actual emergencies.

This isn't just a California thing, either; folks across the pond have had similar reactions. When Facebook went down a second time in 2015, the Kingston Police Department got the drop on their ansty citizens, telling them to go spend some time with their families instead of calling them over a problem they literally couldn't solve if they tried.

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Baltimore saw a 780-pound steer run amok down a two-mile stretch of road before the cops finally wrangled him back in by ... oh ... shooting and killing him. That's sad. Moving on.

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Just this February, New York City cops spent an entire morning chasing down a stubborn bull who had no respect for their barricades and caution tape.

BaltimoreSun.com

This was the third runaway cow the New York officers had seen that year, incidentally. You'd think they would have figured out how to handle these things by that point. Anyways, they finally caught up with the little guy and tranquilized him, but before the animal could be transferred to a care center he passed away, because life is a cruel and punishing mistress who cares not for your happy ending.

Don't worry, we've got at least one uplifting story for you here. When it comes to cattle on the loose, Texas knows exactly what to do, because of course they do. Kinda helps that they have actual cowboys to give them a hand.

BaltimoreSun.com

After a full two hours of chasing that cow all over the city, they finally lassoed the poor creature and ... uh, took him right back to the butcher. Son of a b***h.

Well, the cowboy part was uplifting. You're welcome.

And while those are just emergency phone calls, the actual police can get involved too. One Swedish woman called the cops when her would-be suitor busted ass in her flat. According to the woman, she had been flirting with the guy pretty heavily and had invited him back to her place for some bedtime fun when she changed her mind. Her beau allegedly couldn't handle the rejection and ripped out his revenge, or as she put it, "simply farted and left." The poor guy was investigated, though the case was ultimately thrown out because there was no way to prove the ass-belch came with ill intentions.

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To be fair, sometimes fart-related calls are semi-legitimate. When a Michigan resident heard their neighbor screaming, "No! Stop!" they understandably assumed she was being attacked and called 911. The police arrived on the scene only to discover that the woman was screaming at her boyfriend because he refused to stop farting. While this is certainly not the most constructive way to settle an argument, it is not yet illegal.

This kind of thing happens all the time -- if the cops get a tip that a potentially dangerous criminal might be inside an apartment or restaurant or Blockbuster Video, they're sort of obligated to behave as though the criminal is definitely inside, because it's better to look like a jackass than get shot in the face. For example, Dallas police recently waited outside an apartment for six hours, thinking they were dealing with a hostage situation. When they finally burst inside, they found the place empty, having missed both the suspect and a whole evening of primetime TV. And in Michigan, when officers heard some murder suspects might be hiding in a Flint apartment complex, they spent an entire day waiting outside the building, which turned out to contain zero murderers.

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Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing -- when the police take time and care in a stand-off situation, it minimizes the risk to bystanders, themselves, and the suspect. It's always better than rushing in and whipping your gun out.

Speaking of whipping your gun out ...

Here's a classic example: In the U.K., a police officer noticed that a social club normally closed on the weekends had its door propped open, with sounds of a ruckus emanating from within. He investigated, and walked right into a roomful of very excited women, who got all sorts of rowdy, thinking he was the stripper they had ordered (he was not). The embarrassed (but flattered) officer "beat a hasty retreat" and passed the real "entertainment" on the way out the door.

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These incidents aren't all that carefree. During a massive birthday celebration, also in the U.K., some heavily armed police officers searching for a suspected murderer were mistaken for strippers by a very drunk partygoer. In his defense, this guy had already been visited by an actual stripper dressed as a policewoman that night, and he realized something was up pretty quick with these strippers in that they had actual guns and securely fastened pants.

However, sometimes it takes people way longer to realize their mistake. Another man in the U.K., upon seeing a policewoman enter the bar he was currently patronizing, immediately started yelling to his friends that their stripper had arrived, before dancing around in front of the woman and whipping her with a bar towel. The officer was less than amused and proceeded to arrest the s**t out of him, but the man heroically refused to believe she was an actual peace officer until they arrived at the police station.

You might be noticing a pattern here -- all of these cases of mistaken identities took place in the U.K. And while cops do get mistaken for strippers in other countries, it's still amazing just how many of these cases seemed to occur in England.

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A similar event occurred in the garage of an apartment complex in Sweden, although in this case, respondents were content to let the mysteriously happy trash can buzz on its own until the vibrator within simply died. And in the U.S., Cedar Rapids police were called out to investigate a bag of suspicious items left unattended on a bench outside a daycare center. Both a K-9 unit and a bomb-sniffing robot were dispatched before the cops discovered the bag contained non-explosive sex toys, but the truly disturbing mystery of who left that bag there remains unsolved.

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And finally, a woman in Germany called the police one night when she heard what she thought was the sound of a burglar trying to force his way into her home. Police arrived to discover that the "burglar" was a, um, home entertainment device that had fallen into her bathtub and was rattling away like a tiny jackhammer, resulting in the single most fantastic headline we have ever seen:

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Carolyn's tweets are word crimes.

Also check out The 5 Most Spectacular On-The-Job F#@% Ups By The Police and 5 Insane Things I Did As A Cop (They Don't Show On TV).

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