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!