April 21, 2025 • 15 mins
A 911 call is delayed by nine minutes due to a daylight saving glitch. A teenage boy dies. The system insists everything worked correctly. Odessa follows the threads left behind by the boy’s mother, a broken dispatcher, and the digital breadcrumbs of a moment lost in time. What she finds is not a system malfunction, but a deeply human tragedy hidden in the timestamp of a death no one wanted to acknowledge.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Time is a lie we all agree to tell together.
We shape it into hours and calendars and morning routines.
We wrap it in school bells and digital clocks and deadlines.
We make it make sense until it doesn't, until something slips,
until one minute folds in on itself and swallows everything.
This story begins in the town of Quintin Falls, Pennsylvania,
(00:34):
the kind of place where the river runs dark and
the streets still carry col dust from a century ago.
Old houses lean into each other like they're tired of
standing up. People wave when they drive by, but they
don't always stop. On March twelfth, twenty seventeen, at two
oh three a m. A nine to one one call
(00:56):
came through from a landline registered to a two story
house at the edge of A woman's voice panicked winded.
He's not breathing, she said. The despatcher answered, asked for
the address, but something was off. The time stamp on
the call showed one o three a m. The system
(01:16):
hadn't updated for daylight saving time. The clocks were an
hour behind, and because of that, the call got routed wrong,
delayed by exactly nine minutes and forty three seconds. By
the time the paramedics arrived, Myles Carter was dead. He
was fifteen, had been asleep in his bed when the
seizure hit. Had been found by his mother, Andrea, who
(01:40):
heard the thud from the next room and ran to
him barefoot, slipping on the hallway runner, the cordless phone
already in her hand before she even reached him. She
did everything right. She called fast, she cleared his airway,
she gave compressions. But the system, our system told a
different story. It told her call came before the rollover,
(02:03):
that she hadn't called yet. It lost her inside a technicality.
At the funeral, Andrea didn't cry, not publicly. She sat
stiff in the front row while neighbors brought cast roles
and avoided saying the word time. Time. The coroner said
it wouldn't have made a difference, that Myles was likely
(02:24):
gone before she ever reached him. But they don't know, Andrea.
She knew her son's rhythms like her own breath. She
knew the way his eyes fluttered when he was coming
out of a dream, the way he clenched his left
fist when his body was fighting something. She swore, swore
he was still there when she found him, and she
(02:44):
knew what it meant when the ambulance turned onto their
street at two thirteen, ten minutes too late. I first
heard about the case from a tech contractor who'd been
hired by the county to audit their dispatch software. He'd
been instructed not to speak to press, but I'm not press.
I'm just someone who listens long enough that people forget
(03:05):
they weren't supposed to talk. He said. The system didn't fail,
it just wasn't ready. That's the same thing as failure.
There was no lawsuit, no headlines. The county said everything
worked as intended, that all local systems had documented the
time change and followed standard daylight saving protocol. But buried
(03:26):
in a PDF audit three months later was a line
that said, this router logs show called number one seven
four dash one one, originating from eight one four dash
five five five dash nine three four to two was
time stamped improperly due to DSD rollover conflict between device
and server. That was Andrea's call. She never got an apology,
(03:49):
just silence and then more silence, the kind that sticks
around long after the cast roles stopped coming. I went
to Quintin Falls two years after Miles died, the house
was still there, white paint peeling at the trim, bird
bath in the front yard, dry and cracked. Andrea answered
the door like she already knew who I was. She
(04:12):
didn't say hello, just opened the screen and stepped aside.
Her living room felt preserved, like time had stopped, even
though the clocks kept ticking. There were three of them
on the mantel, on the wall, on a side table
near the couch, all of them showing different times. None
of them write. I asked her why she kept them
(04:33):
that way. She said, I don't believe in clocks anymore.
We sat down, she made tea. It didn't take notes,
just listen. She told me about Miles, his obsession with planets,
how he thought leap years were magical because they proved
the world wasn't perfect. How he used to set his
(04:53):
watch three minutes fast because he said it helped him
never be late. She said she kept the phone the landline,
never plugged it back in. It sits in a drawer
next to his birth certificate and a stack of drawings
he never finished. She said, people treat this like a
glitch and nothing, but it was a moment a moment
(05:15):
that went wrong, and I watched it eat him. Andrea
doesn't speak publicly. She doesn't want her grief on a stage.
But she let me see something. A folder labeled call logs,
inside where a dozen print outs her call, the dispatcher's notes,
a map showing the route the ambulance took, her annotations
(05:37):
in red pen This is where I screamed, this is
the turn they missed. This is the minute he needed.
She had marked everything like a crime scene, because that's
what it was. She gave me a copy, told me
to tell it. Right after I left the house, I
visited the County Despatch center. They didn't want to talk
(05:59):
to me, but I waited long enough that a technician
finally slipped me a name, Carrie Alden. She'd been the
dispatcher on duty that night. I found her two towns over,
working night shift at a library. She didn't deny anything,
she said. I knew something was wrong the second I
saw the call come in. It felt wrong, it looked early.
(06:23):
She'd reported it flagged the system wrote a formal note.
No one ever followed up. I asked if she remembered
Andrea's voice. She said, I still hear it. She said
she took a job at the library because it was quiet,
because it didn't rely on clocks or coordination, because she
couldn't live with another minute slipping through her fingers. There's
(06:47):
a box under her desk, clippings, emails, error reports. She
said she meant to give it to some one, maybe
a lawyer, maybe the boy's mother, but she never did.
She gave it to me. I'm still going through it.
In the back of the folder, behind all the print
outs was a sticky note with seven words on it.
(07:08):
We think we have time? We don't. Time didn't kill
Miles Carter, neglected bureaucracy, did software that wasn't built for
real lives? Did we think we have time? We don't.
I went back to Andrea's house one more time. I
brought her a clock, nothing special, just an old analog
(07:30):
thing I'd picked up at a flea market. The hands
moved slow, steady. She looked at it, then at me.
She said, I'll set it to the minute I found him,
so I don't forget. I didn't know what to say.
Some silences aren't meant to be filled. I left the house,
drove until my gas light came on, pulled into a
(07:52):
station with a flickering fluorescent light and a vending machine
that ate my dollar. I watched the sky go dark,
checked my phone. It was two o three a m.
And all the clocks were wrong. I stayed in Quinton
Falls longer than I planned. Sometimes a place has gravity,
not because of what it is now, but because of
what happened there. The weight of choices made, clocks ignored,
(08:16):
systems trusted too long. I spent the next morning walking
the perimeter of Miles Carter's school, chain link fence, weathered
basketball hoops, a digital sign out front, still blinking announcements
from last semester. I stood under a maple tree that
dropped gold leaves like notes into the wind. A janitor
(08:37):
sweeping the sidewalk looked up at me, nodded, then said,
you here for the boy. I said yes, without asking
how he knew. He told me Myles used to help
him carry supplies in from the maintenance shed. Always polite,
always early. Used to tell me if you're on time,
you're already five minutes late. He said it like it
(08:59):
was a joke, but he meant it. I asked if
the school ever held a memorial. He shook his head.
There was talk, but then everyone got nervous about legal stuff.
Didn't want to admit anything had gone wrong, didn't want
to tie themselves to it. That's how it happens. Grief
becomes shame, shame becomes silence, and silence becomes policy. I
(09:24):
found his locker still had the sticker residue from old decals.
Some one had written m C in white out near
the top. I traced it with my finger tip. The
metal was cold. There was a teacher, Missus Delaney English.
She remembered him too, said he loved stories that spent time.
(09:45):
That He once asked her if characters in books age
while they're waiting for you to come back to them.
She kept one of his essays. It was about clocks.
I read it. It started with a line I still
can't forget. Every clock is a liar. That's why they
need batteries. That's why they tick. It's their guilt showing.
(10:06):
That night, I drove back to the motel where I
was staying two towns over, nothing fancy, but something had
shifted in me. The silence in that room felt too wide.
I pulled the blankets tight and stared at the ceiling
like it might open up. I thought about Andrea, about
the look in her eyes when she handed me that folder,
(10:27):
like she was giving me a map to a country
no one believed existed. I thought about the dispatcher, Carrie
and her voice shaking on the phone as she told
me I checked the tape. The gall was real, it
just got lost in the hand off. I thought about
the technician who flagged the bug and never followed up,
About the county IT director who told the press everything
(10:51):
had performed within acceptable parameters, like those words could cover
a mother's scream, acceptable parameters that the phrase should be illegal.
A week later, I got a call. It was from
a number I didn't recognize. The voice on the other
end was young tentative. Are you the one doing the
(11:11):
podcast about the boy about Miles Carter? I said yes.
The caller paused, then said I think I was on
the other line. I didn't understand at first. Then they
explained their name was Leo Alvarez. They were seventeen at
the time, home alone. The night Miles dide, same county,
(11:33):
different township there that had fallen and dislocated his shoulder.
Leo had panicked called nine one one at two O
four a m they were patched through to the wrong dispatcher.
That dispatcher should have been Andrea's, but because of the
time conflict, Andrea's call was held in que while the
system processed Leo's instead. Leo said, the response time was fast.
(11:58):
They got help in under six minutes. I didn't know,
they said, I didn't know someone else was calling at
the same time. I didn't know someone died. I told
them it wasn't their fault. They didn't sound convinced. They
told me they didn't sleep well anymore, that when they dreamt,
it was always the same thing, a hallway full of clocks,
(12:21):
each one taking a different rhythm. None of them write.
I keep hearing him breathing, Leo said, even though I
never met him, like I've borrowed his time, borrowed time.
That phrase echoed in me like a heartbeat in an
empty stairwell. After I hung up, I sat in my
(12:41):
car for a long time, let the engine idle, watched
the numbers on the dashboard shift and blink. None of
them felt real. I started thinking about how often we
trust machines, GPS, timestamps, reminders on our phones. But all
of it, every bit is built on code written by people,
(13:02):
and people forget things. People forget that time isn't a fact,
it's a fiction we agree on and when someone forgets
to adjust the story, people fall through the cracks. I
reached out to the software company that managed the county's
emergency routing program. They sent me a statement said they'd
(13:23):
reviewed the system logs and found no critical failure within
the software framework at the time in question. Then they
offered me a demo of their new platform. I declined.
They didn't ask why, but someone from their old engineering
team did call me off the record. He told me
the time stamp bug had been flagged internally three years
(13:44):
before Miles died, that it only occurred during leap years
and DST transitions, that it had been marked low priority
in the queue. No one expected it to actually hurt anyone,
he said, it was just annoying. Then he said something
I've never forgotten. We were working with numbers, but she
(14:06):
was working with a heartbeat. She Andrea, she was the
only one who treated time like a living thing. She said,
when Miles was born, I timed every contraction. I knew
how long it took him to breathe, I knew when
he had fevers before the thermometer did. You can't tell
(14:26):
me those minutes didn't matter. She was right, They mattered.
They always do. I've spoken to twenty people connected to
this story, neighbors, paramedics, teachers, programmers. All of them say
the same thing. It wasn't a big deal. It was
a hiccup, a wrinkle, a moment. But a moment is
(14:48):
all it takes. Miles Carter should be twenty two this year.
He should be walking across some college campus with headphones in.
He should be telling bad jokes to his mom and
asking her to venmo him twenty bucks. He should be
planning a trip, changing his majure, falling in love. Instead,
he's a line and a server log, a case file
(15:10):
buried under a bureaucratic dust. But not here. Here, he's
a name we remember, a moment we refused to call acceptable.
A boy who noticed clocks, who knew they lied, who
said his own watch three minutes fast because he didn't
trust time to keep up with him. And maybe he
was right. Maybe we're always late, maybe we're already behind,
(15:33):
and maybe, just maybe stories like his are how we
catch up. Not every mystery is meant to be solved,
but all of them are meant to be understood. Quiet,
Please dot Ai hear what matters.
Time is a lie we all agree to tell together.
We shape it into hours and calendars and morning routines.
We wrap it in school bells and digital clocks and deadlines.
We make it make sense until it doesn't, until something slips,
until one minute folds in on itself and swallows everything.
This story begins in the town of Quintin Falls, Pennsylvania,
(00:34):
the kind of place where the river runs dark and
the streets still carry col dust from a century ago.
Old houses lean into each other like they're tired of
standing up. People wave when they drive by, but they
don't always stop. On March twelfth, twenty seventeen, at two
oh three a m. A nine to one one call
(00:56):
came through from a landline registered to a two story
house at the edge of A woman's voice panicked winded.
He's not breathing, she said. The despatcher answered, asked for
the address, but something was off. The time stamp on
the call showed one o three a m. The system
(01:16):
hadn't updated for daylight saving time. The clocks were an
hour behind, and because of that, the call got routed wrong,
delayed by exactly nine minutes and forty three seconds. By
the time the paramedics arrived, Myles Carter was dead. He
was fifteen, had been asleep in his bed when the
seizure hit. Had been found by his mother, Andrea, who
(01:40):
heard the thud from the next room and ran to
him barefoot, slipping on the hallway runner, the cordless phone
already in her hand before she even reached him. She
did everything right. She called fast, she cleared his airway,
she gave compressions. But the system, our system told a
different story. It told her call came before the rollover,
(02:03):
that she hadn't called yet. It lost her inside a technicality.
At the funeral, Andrea didn't cry, not publicly. She sat
stiff in the front row while neighbors brought cast roles
and avoided saying the word time. Time. The coroner said
it wouldn't have made a difference, that Myles was likely
(02:24):
gone before she ever reached him. But they don't know, Andrea.
She knew her son's rhythms like her own breath. She
knew the way his eyes fluttered when he was coming
out of a dream, the way he clenched his left
fist when his body was fighting something. She swore, swore
he was still there when she found him, and she
(02:44):
knew what it meant when the ambulance turned onto their
street at two thirteen, ten minutes too late. I first
heard about the case from a tech contractor who'd been
hired by the county to audit their dispatch software. He'd
been instructed not to speak to press, but I'm not press.
I'm just someone who listens long enough that people forget
(03:05):
they weren't supposed to talk. He said. The system didn't fail,
it just wasn't ready. That's the same thing as failure.
There was no lawsuit, no headlines. The county said everything
worked as intended, that all local systems had documented the
time change and followed standard daylight saving protocol. But buried
(03:26):
in a PDF audit three months later was a line
that said, this router logs show called number one seven
four dash one one, originating from eight one four dash
five five five dash nine three four to two was
time stamped improperly due to DSD rollover conflict between device
and server. That was Andrea's call. She never got an apology,
(03:49):
just silence and then more silence, the kind that sticks
around long after the cast roles stopped coming. I went
to Quintin Falls two years after Miles died, the house
was still there, white paint peeling at the trim, bird
bath in the front yard, dry and cracked. Andrea answered
the door like she already knew who I was. She
(04:12):
didn't say hello, just opened the screen and stepped aside.
Her living room felt preserved, like time had stopped, even
though the clocks kept ticking. There were three of them
on the mantel, on the wall, on a side table
near the couch, all of them showing different times. None
of them write. I asked her why she kept them
(04:33):
that way. She said, I don't believe in clocks anymore.
We sat down, she made tea. It didn't take notes,
just listen. She told me about Miles, his obsession with planets,
how he thought leap years were magical because they proved
the world wasn't perfect. How he used to set his
(04:53):
watch three minutes fast because he said it helped him
never be late. She said she kept the phone the landline,
never plugged it back in. It sits in a drawer
next to his birth certificate and a stack of drawings
he never finished. She said, people treat this like a
glitch and nothing, but it was a moment a moment
(05:15):
that went wrong, and I watched it eat him. Andrea
doesn't speak publicly. She doesn't want her grief on a stage.
But she let me see something. A folder labeled call logs,
inside where a dozen print outs her call, the dispatcher's notes,
a map showing the route the ambulance took, her annotations
(05:37):
in red pen This is where I screamed, this is
the turn they missed. This is the minute he needed.
She had marked everything like a crime scene, because that's
what it was. She gave me a copy, told me
to tell it. Right after I left the house, I
visited the County Despatch center. They didn't want to talk
(05:59):
to me, but I waited long enough that a technician
finally slipped me a name, Carrie Alden. She'd been the
dispatcher on duty that night. I found her two towns over,
working night shift at a library. She didn't deny anything,
she said. I knew something was wrong the second I
saw the call come in. It felt wrong, it looked early.
(06:23):
She'd reported it flagged the system wrote a formal note.
No one ever followed up. I asked if she remembered
Andrea's voice. She said, I still hear it. She said
she took a job at the library because it was quiet,
because it didn't rely on clocks or coordination, because she
couldn't live with another minute slipping through her fingers. There's
(06:47):
a box under her desk, clippings, emails, error reports. She
said she meant to give it to some one, maybe
a lawyer, maybe the boy's mother, but she never did.
She gave it to me. I'm still going through it.
In the back of the folder, behind all the print
outs was a sticky note with seven words on it.
(07:08):
We think we have time? We don't. Time didn't kill
Miles Carter, neglected bureaucracy, did software that wasn't built for
real lives? Did we think we have time? We don't.
I went back to Andrea's house one more time. I
brought her a clock, nothing special, just an old analog
(07:30):
thing I'd picked up at a flea market. The hands
moved slow, steady. She looked at it, then at me.
She said, I'll set it to the minute I found him,
so I don't forget. I didn't know what to say.
Some silences aren't meant to be filled. I left the house,
drove until my gas light came on, pulled into a
(07:52):
station with a flickering fluorescent light and a vending machine
that ate my dollar. I watched the sky go dark,
checked my phone. It was two o three a m.
And all the clocks were wrong. I stayed in Quinton
Falls longer than I planned. Sometimes a place has gravity,
not because of what it is now, but because of
what happened there. The weight of choices made, clocks ignored,
(08:16):
systems trusted too long. I spent the next morning walking
the perimeter of Miles Carter's school, chain link fence, weathered
basketball hoops, a digital sign out front, still blinking announcements
from last semester. I stood under a maple tree that
dropped gold leaves like notes into the wind. A janitor
(08:37):
sweeping the sidewalk looked up at me, nodded, then said,
you here for the boy. I said yes, without asking
how he knew. He told me Myles used to help
him carry supplies in from the maintenance shed. Always polite,
always early. Used to tell me if you're on time,
you're already five minutes late. He said it like it
(08:59):
was a joke, but he meant it. I asked if
the school ever held a memorial. He shook his head.
There was talk, but then everyone got nervous about legal stuff.
Didn't want to admit anything had gone wrong, didn't want
to tie themselves to it. That's how it happens. Grief
becomes shame, shame becomes silence, and silence becomes policy. I
(09:24):
found his locker still had the sticker residue from old decals.
Some one had written m C in white out near
the top. I traced it with my finger tip. The
metal was cold. There was a teacher, Missus Delaney English.
She remembered him too, said he loved stories that spent time.
(09:45):
That He once asked her if characters in books age
while they're waiting for you to come back to them.
She kept one of his essays. It was about clocks.
I read it. It started with a line I still
can't forget. Every clock is a liar. That's why they
need batteries. That's why they tick. It's their guilt showing.
(10:06):
That night, I drove back to the motel where I
was staying two towns over, nothing fancy, but something had
shifted in me. The silence in that room felt too wide.
I pulled the blankets tight and stared at the ceiling
like it might open up. I thought about Andrea, about
the look in her eyes when she handed me that folder,
(10:27):
like she was giving me a map to a country
no one believed existed. I thought about the dispatcher, Carrie
and her voice shaking on the phone as she told
me I checked the tape. The gall was real, it
just got lost in the hand off. I thought about
the technician who flagged the bug and never followed up,
About the county IT director who told the press everything
(10:51):
had performed within acceptable parameters, like those words could cover
a mother's scream, acceptable parameters that the phrase should be illegal.
A week later, I got a call. It was from
a number I didn't recognize. The voice on the other
end was young tentative. Are you the one doing the
(11:11):
podcast about the boy about Miles Carter? I said yes.
The caller paused, then said I think I was on
the other line. I didn't understand at first. Then they
explained their name was Leo Alvarez. They were seventeen at
the time, home alone. The night Miles dide, same county,
(11:33):
different township there that had fallen and dislocated his shoulder.
Leo had panicked called nine one one at two O
four a m they were patched through to the wrong dispatcher.
That dispatcher should have been Andrea's, but because of the
time conflict, Andrea's call was held in que while the
system processed Leo's instead. Leo said, the response time was fast.
(11:58):
They got help in under six minutes. I didn't know,
they said, I didn't know someone else was calling at
the same time. I didn't know someone died. I told
them it wasn't their fault. They didn't sound convinced. They
told me they didn't sleep well anymore, that when they dreamt,
it was always the same thing, a hallway full of clocks,
(12:21):
each one taking a different rhythm. None of them write.
I keep hearing him breathing, Leo said, even though I
never met him, like I've borrowed his time, borrowed time.
That phrase echoed in me like a heartbeat in an
empty stairwell. After I hung up, I sat in my
(12:41):
car for a long time, let the engine idle, watched
the numbers on the dashboard shift and blink. None of
them felt real. I started thinking about how often we
trust machines, GPS, timestamps, reminders on our phones. But all
of it, every bit is built on code written by people,
(13:02):
and people forget things. People forget that time isn't a fact,
it's a fiction we agree on and when someone forgets
to adjust the story, people fall through the cracks. I
reached out to the software company that managed the county's
emergency routing program. They sent me a statement said they'd
(13:23):
reviewed the system logs and found no critical failure within
the software framework at the time in question. Then they
offered me a demo of their new platform. I declined.
They didn't ask why, but someone from their old engineering
team did call me off the record. He told me
the time stamp bug had been flagged internally three years
(13:44):
before Miles died, that it only occurred during leap years
and DST transitions, that it had been marked low priority
in the queue. No one expected it to actually hurt anyone,
he said, it was just annoying. Then he said something
I've never forgotten. We were working with numbers, but she
(14:06):
was working with a heartbeat. She Andrea, she was the
only one who treated time like a living thing. She said,
when Miles was born, I timed every contraction. I knew
how long it took him to breathe, I knew when
he had fevers before the thermometer did. You can't tell
(14:26):
me those minutes didn't matter. She was right, They mattered.
They always do. I've spoken to twenty people connected to
this story, neighbors, paramedics, teachers, programmers. All of them say
the same thing. It wasn't a big deal. It was
a hiccup, a wrinkle, a moment. But a moment is
(14:48):
all it takes. Miles Carter should be twenty two this year.
He should be walking across some college campus with headphones in.
He should be telling bad jokes to his mom and
asking her to venmo him twenty bucks. He should be
planning a trip, changing his majure, falling in love. Instead,
he's a line and a server log, a case file
(15:10):
buried under a bureaucratic dust. But not here. Here, he's
a name we remember, a moment we refused to call acceptable.
A boy who noticed clocks, who knew they lied, who
said his own watch three minutes fast because he didn't
trust time to keep up with him. And maybe he
was right. Maybe we're always late, maybe we're already behind,
(15:33):
and maybe, just maybe stories like his are how we
catch up. Not every mystery is meant to be solved,
but all of them are meant to be understood. Quiet,
Please dot Ai hear what matters.
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