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Calls to emergency assistance providers, and helplines more generally, have typically been analyzed from the assumption that for both caller and call taker, the primary orientation is the reason for the call. For the caller, this is one of seeking, and for the call taker, that of attempting to provide some specified help, assistance, or advice. In this article, we draw on the opening sequences on calls to “Kids Help Line,” a national Australian helpline and counseling service for children and young persons aged between 5 and 18, to show this assumption as problematic for this service. The helpline operates from a child-centered organizational philosophy, we care, we listen, rather than we can solve your problems. Unlike many helplines in which an explicit offer of help is made in the call taker's opening turn, the Kids Help Line counselors provide only an organizational identification. The consequence of this design is that the onus is placed on the caller to account for the call, a process that typically involves the announcement or description of a trouble or problem and then, delivered separately, a specific reason for the call. In particular, we identify one construction in which the caller formulates their reason for the call with a claim to the effect that they do not to know what to do. Utterances such as this work, we argue, as sequence closing devices, a method by which the caller demonstrates the trouble has been adequately described and that they are now ready for counseling advice. We investigate the structural and sequential features of the opening turns that provide for the occurrence of this particular accounting work.
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