Long week comes to a close

Today is finally my Saturday, after what was a long week of abnormal days off and switching from second shift to first shift and back to second shift. Very discombobulating.

At 911 our weeks start on Saturday, and every 4 weeks, our days off shift over 1 day. This Saturday was the shift shift (haha, see what I did there?). What ends up happening on these weeks is you work 6 days in a row. My days off were supposed to be Sunday and Monday this week, but I opted to move one of my days off to Wednesday in order to accommodate a training class I had to attend Thursday and Friday. So I was already tired after the 6 day week and didn't get a full weekend. On Tuesday I went into work 2 hours early so I could attend a TTY training class, which is one way deaf and hard of hearing people can communicate with 911. So I got off 2 hours early that night, which was nice.

Wednesday I had a hair appointment bright and early at 9:15 am with my friend Katelyn, who I went to esthetician school with. She's gone back to Aveda for cosmetology, which suits me just fine! She gave me a nice, much needed hair cut, and it was nice to catch up with her after several months, too. I also bought some new shampoo which is meant to balance the pH of the scalp. It's great to have some professional quality shampoo again. The difference between it and drug store brands is so evident and my hair feels so much better.

Since my hair appointment was so early after a sort of late night, I decided to go home and take a nap... what I didn't plan for was that I'd nap for FOUR hours. The whole reason I took Wednesday off was so that I wouldn't have to work until 11pm and then have to be up for training on Thursday at 6:20am. But my long nap meant I couldn't fall asleep at a decent time and I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep anyway. Oh well.

Thursday and Friday, my training was at the Academy starting at 8am with the entire recruit class. I was the only other one in the class, which was pretty awkward. Here's a group of more than 30 people who have spent 23 weeks together and bonded with one another... and then me, hah. The first day was pretty lonely, about 3 or 4 talked to me very briefly and that was it. On Friday, though, I guess they became a little curious about the strange person in the room and talked to me much more. I actually found one guy who went to the Citadel, and another who either is from or lived in Charleston. We talked about Charleston and it made me feel all nostalgic and a little giddy just to be able to talk about it with someone who understands. The Citadel grad was there at the same time I was, too.

The training class over those 2 days was to learn about NCIC and DCI, which are criminal information systems run by the FBI and the state, respectively. Even though most of the class was lecture I found learning about it pretty interesting, especially because I'll be using it daily in my job soon. The instructor was a very seasoned officer and a NCIC/DCI expert, and I enjoyed her stories about the ways she's used the systems to her advantage over the years.

On Friday I passed the final exam with a 97% and so am officially certified to use NCIC and DCI for two years! :)

After I got out of training on Thursday, though, Katie and I met up at the movies and saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I have been looking forward to seeing this movie since last year, when I spontaneously decided to re-read the book and then immediately discovered it was being made into a movie.. with Tom Hanks! And Sandra Bullock! And John Goodman! Ugh, so good. The movie was really, really well done. The quirkiness of the main character and Jonathon Saffron-Foer translated to film so well. I have a lot of respect for the person who adapted it. There were elements that were missing, as is always the case, and I especially wished the man with all the nails had been featured, but overall, I was impressed.

After the movie, Katie and I headed up to Uptown to have dinner with her fiancé and his friend at Nothing But Noodles, which I can never turn down. Originally I thought we were going to the location nearest to my house, which I've eaten at several times, although not since the pregnant manager of the restaurant next door was murdered by a coworker and stashed behind a dumpster a month ago... I'm glad we went to the other location.

So, yesterday was my Friday, and my first day back to work in 3 days, which felt strange. Near the beginning of my shift, a man called in and said he had just heard from his elderly mother who lives alone, and she was saying that something was on fire. He wanted officers to go check on her and make sure everything was okay. I looked up her address and saw that there were actually police and fire on the scene of a working house fire across the street. I explained to the gentleman that the engines would be across the street from her at the moment but we'd send somebody over to speak with her if he wanted. He declined, saying that he had not been able to gather from her what was going on but that she was probably just telling him what she was seeing outside her house. He was very appreciative that I explained to him what was going on and got my name before he hung up. Several minutes later, one of the supervisors called me up to the bridge to speak with him. He asked me if I remembered the call and told me the gentleman had called back to say that he so appreciated my service and had never been treated so nicely by 911. I could tell just speaking with the man earlier that he was thankful for my service, but it meant a lot that he called to speak with my supervisors and compliment me to them as well. I actually teared up as I sat back down--PMS much? The supervisor told me to keep up the great work and I was very happy.


I printed out the fire call and wrote the story of what happened on it and asked the supervisor to put it in my file for my eventual yearly review. :)

I have written so much now and almost none of it is that interesting. Sorry about that. I've actually been really bored since I woke up and was looking for something to do, and this has occupied me now for a little while. Back to being bored! I have no plans for the Super Bowl tonight unfortunately, but I'll still watch it by myself in my apartment. Looks like it'll be a lonely night.

Let me help you help yourself.

This blog post was written in between calls as I worked tonight.

I wish I could write and dispense a user's manual for calling 911. As a normal citizen who doesn't use emergency services often, you may think that the calls you hear on the news (funny, tragic, heroic, etc.) are shining examples of how citizens act when they call 911. The unfortunate truth, beyond the fact that those calls have generally been edited and spliced to sound coherent and informative, is that the probably decent, upstanding citizenry seem to collectively lose their ever-loving minds as soon as a call to 911 connects.

The first and most important rule of thumb is not to scream your information. Seems reasonable, right? I'll get a little more technical to help you understand what a problem it really is. Cell phones have noise cancellation technology that is meant to help both parties hear more clearly. This is the sort of blessing technology that allows you to pee while on the phone with your closest friends and family (or telemarketers), leaving them none the wiser. If you are screaming into your phone, however, the noise cancellation technology works against you. The resulting distortion is extremely hard to understand, at best, and impossible to understand, at worst. So, first, calm down and talk in a normal speaking voice. It'll save everybody the agitation of having you repeat information twelve times over.

The second rule of thumb is to have the most important information ready for the operator you speak to. I wish that I could utilize a poll to ask citizens what they think the most important information is for any call. Let me tell you what is not important: what the weather's like, what has transpired between you and your mom over the last 20 years to leave your relationship is disrepair, the fact that you've already contacted your lawyer. Amazingly, the most important information in your call isn't even the reason you're calling police. THE most important information about every single call is where you are and, more specifically, where you need police to be. Just like in real estate, it's location, location, location. If you're unfamiliar with the area you're calling from, know where to look for an address. Sometimes businesses put their building numbers on their signs by the street. Sometimes it's above the door to the business. If you're inside a business, ask an employee for their address. If you're literally dying, giving a street name and a business name is permissible. If you're not, do your part to find out where the hell you are.

In the era of Google Maps, many people--myself included--seem to have stopped looking at street signs and building numbers, and I suspect that businesses and houses alike have stopped displaying address information as prominently as they once did. But let me tell you something. An address is the most important thing about your call, whether you've been in a fender-bender, see a suspicious person, or are shot and dying. I don't want to send an officer out to Main Street to look for you, not because I'm being mean, but because I really want them to get to you as quickly as possible. And Main Street is a long fucking road.

My last bit of advice, and this will help you in every step of your call, is to listen to the dispatcher. Sometimes, especially if you're reporting a high priority call, the dispatcher will let you yell out everything that comes to your mind. But inevitably, they will have questions for you. This is because a dispatcher is trained in what information police officers want and need in order to increase efficiency. Many times, callers have more information than they realize. But they also have quite a bit more useless information than they realize, and it is up to the dispatcher to sift through it all.

First Post

So, I've decided I want to start occupying another little part of the Internet, separate from the make-up/nail stuff. I have some interesting things going on in my life, and I think I'll always have that urge to write, so I'm hoping to create a small place to share or vent or express or whatever it is I want to do. Maybe I'll even be half-decent at updating this regularly.

Probably, it'll mostly be people who know me who come to read what I have to say, so some of the information may be redundant. Sorry about that in advance!

The first thing I want to talk about is my job, which I am still so very thankful to have. On Friday, January 13th, I was officially "released" onto 911, which means that I no longer have the safety net of my trainer listening in to all my calls. In fact, I've already switched over to 2nd shift while my trainer remains on 1st, and I'm starting my second week by myself tomorrow. I'm fully liable and have to figure things out on my own, even though that means asking the supervisors and my neighboring dispatchers lots of questions. I've already learned--and messed up--so much more during the week by myself. It's so interesting how even though calls are similar, they're never the same. It's challenging and different every moment.

Last Friday I took a super challenging call, a threat to some of our officers. The caller was evidently attempting to disguise his voice, and he even invoked the name of a man convicted of killing 2 of our officers a few years ago. The call was 26 seconds long and I listened to it over and over. He only allowed me to ask him for an address, said a few things, and then hung up. It wasn't enough time to get a good plot on his location, and he called from a 911-only phone. I have to admit, it shook me up a little bit. I have learned that, working at 911, I will speak to some people on really terrible days in their lives. But it's an entirely different sort of reckoning to do with yourself mentally when a civilian is calling in to threaten people whom you're responsible for protecting; as much as it is my job to protect the citizens, it is also my job to protect the officers. It was intense last hour of work.

Enough about the job! I am getting excited about a mini-vacation coming up. My youngest cousin's bat-mitzvah, for which I'll be traveling to Atlanta! I've got the 2 days of vacation approved so I'll be headed there on the 10th. I haven't seen this side of my family in a while, and it'll be nice to get away for a few days.

Last weekend, I went down to visit my family in Myrtle Beach for the first time in more than 7 months. The beach was refreshingly dead, and I was so happy to see my family and my dogs. My Roadie misses me so much when I'm away, and when I'm there he wants to be touching me constantly. We cuddled a lot and he slept with me both nights. My mom said on the night I left, he scratched at her door to get out and went and stood next to my door, waiting on me.

 Here he is being the most adorable little brat ever.

While I was in my childhood bedroom for the weekend, I went through a couple boxes of my things and came across some things I couldn't even make myself open and read. Specifically, a few notebooks full of my teenage angst-and-emotion-filled ramblings. I definitely need to go through them soon, though, even if I turned bright red just looking at the pages.

And on that note, I think I'm going to sign off of my first post here. Check back for new posts soon!