I should make it clear that I'm certainly not defending the actions of this stupid woman buy it does point out that one person's definition of an 'emergency' might be different to someone else's.
There was a case where a woman boarding a train lost her shoe as she stepped on board. (It fell onto the track). To prevent the train leaving (and so that her shoe could be retrieved), she pulled the communication cord. British Transport Police prosecuted her for pulling the communication cord 'other than in an emergency' but the court ruled that the situation was a genuine emergency to the woman, and acquitted her.
As a governor of the RNLI, I'm surprised that Tiggerblue10 thinks that the service encounters similar problems. Of course there are a few idiots who make completely fictitious/malicious calls but anything similar to the supermarket trolley scenario should never be referred to the RNLI because they don't take calls directly. (Emergency calls go through to H M Coastguard. If someone calls just because their beach ball is being blown out to sea, the call will be filtered out before it can reach the RNLI).
Sometimes genuine 999 calls can prove to be rather embarrassing for the caller. When I worked on the railways, a colleague reported to me that she thought she'd seen a light flickering, like a flame, in the cab of a loco in the sidings. (This was in the early hours of the morning). I took a look and thought that I could see smoke. So I placed an emergency call to the signaller (to stop all train movements in the area) and then called the fire brigade. When they put the location into their computer, it correctly flashed up a warning that the loco was adjacent to a major fuel store. Accordingly, every single fire engine from across half of the county was immediately dispatched to the site, together with the major incident unit. The train driver, who had just burnt his bacon on the Calor gas cooker in his