I am going to apologize in advance for whatever may happen here today. This blog has been forming in my mind for a little while so I thought it was about time to get it all out. I would also like to say up front that this blog is not about getting sympathy, thanks, attention and it is not about preaching to anyone. Well, maybe at the end...if you make it there. I don't like to talk about things that bother me but this is one way I can do it without feeling like I am burdening anyone. We all need someone to talk to, right? Well here I am. Talking to you now.
Sometimes it is really hard to come to work. Most days I look forward to it though. I can't wait to see what will happen on my shift. I can't wait to see if I can handle whatever is thrown at me. I anticipate the challenges that could and just might come my way. One ring of the phone and we're off to the races! That is most days. It is those "sometimes" that seem to trip me up. It is those "sometimes" that all I can think about are those things that have happened in years past; months past; days past; and not just from working in dispatch but all of life's tragedies.
Sometimes when I talk to people...and I will interject here that it is NEVER small town people. Never people that I know or have known for years. I'm talking about when I go to a bigger city. When I talk to strangers...and I tell them that I am a dispatcher. I usually get the same old thing and I'm telling you...it's old! "Oh you answer phones all day!" or "So, you're a secretary for cops?" I used to just shake my head and walk away because it was just easier than pointing out the facts that some people don't or can't understand.
I was going to start listing everything we do when the proverbial shit hits the fan but I'm not going to do that. We could be here for days if I do that. But I will say that we have two stations and on those two stations, we have multiple radios that we are learning to use new technology on all the time, we have 911 phones as well as admin phones with multiple lines, we have (just in our office currently) 8 monitors that we have to keep an eye on mostly all the time, and several programs on those screens that need our attention at any given time.
We have multiple fire departments and ambulances to page out and keep track of what they are doing; all while we are doing the other things that have to be done. And then we get to tack on the weather because that is something we always have an abundance of, right? Downpours, fog, ice, snow, tornadoes, floods. And if we're lucky, we get to do jail duties through it all, when a jailer is not scheduled. So the list just keeps going. Sounds fun, huh?
But, that isn't what this blog is about. What this is about is that we are human beings behind that phone, behind that screen and we work our tails off. We come back every day because we care to. It's what is within us. And while that seems to be noble on the outside, think about what we carry with us on the inside. The things that stay with us for days, months, years, the rest of our lives. The things we hear and sometimes can never stop hearing.
Sometimes when we pick up the phone, we get to hear hate and venom spew out of people's mouths. And usually it is directed right at us simply because we answered the phone. I realize the majority of the time it isn't meant to be directed at us but when a situation gets heated, it's hard to control your emotions no matter who you are talking to.
Sometimes when we pick up the phone, we get blamed because we can't get help to someone fast enough. We need to get information so we can pass it along to the people that need to come help you. We don't just ask you questions because we're bored. We have ways to deal with boredom right here without your help. The more details a dispatcher can get about a call, the better the call will be. You never know what teeny tiny detail you give a dispatcher can be an "Aha!" moment for the people working the call. People can be very full of rage for many different reasons and they can get quite vulgar toward the person they are talking to on the phone and again, I realize it is usually misplaced anger. But still.....we feel that.
I can't tell you how many times I have wished to be able to pass through the phone line to get to my caller; some to hug, others to punch.
Sometimes when we pick up the phone and we hear someone completely beside themselves, barely able to talk to us, because they have just found their spouse, significant other, parent or child unresponsive. Those calls are hard ones because immediately your heart is going out to that caller and your first instinct is to get them help and get someone to them to help them get through this ordeal. I promise you, we are working as fast as we can to get help to you and your loved one.
Not long ago, our neighboring county had multiple officers shot and it happened within our county. Never in my life will I ever forget the sound of that dispatcher saying they have officers down. As quickly as I could get my foot on the mic pedal to get my people, and many others headed that way, a lot of emotions were already starting to surface. I was immediately pissed off and scared for those guys. My hands and my voice were shaking and I remember my jailer asking if I needed him to take over. "This is what we train for" is all I could hear myself say.
And then, when everyone is on scene and doing all they need to do, we get to sit and wait. We wait for any bit of news. Any information on who is hurt, how badly they are hurt, what is going on? Radio silence is by far the worst sound in the world for me, and I'm sure many others. Sometimes, the not knowing hurts more than anything. See those guys that were involved, they weren't my local people but they are my people. Their lives are just as important to me as my own local guy's lives. And no matter how mad I get at them (and I do get mad at them), I will always care and I will always be here for them.
I have heard a lot of dispatchers...usually from bigger departments...say that the hardest part of this job is the not knowing, after a call is done. I am blessed to work with the guys that I do because they share what they can, knowing I need that closure as much as anybody else. Nobody wants to spend a week reading a great book, only to get to the last chapter and it wasn't ever written. We work hard for these calls and we deserve to know what happens after we hang up.
It is nothing for a dispatcher to experience many, if not all, emotions during one shift and I'll tell you how I handle that. Not anybody else, just me. If I leave work and I'm angry and full of rage, I will hold that in until I get to my safe place...my husband...and that poor guy gets unloaded on. It took him a while but he understand now that none of it is directed at him; I just need him to listen and understand where I'm coming from AND to tell me if I'm angry for the wrong reasons. I tell ya, he doesn't get paid near enough for putting up with me some days.
When I leave work happy, I turn up the radio and either open the sun roof or put the windows down. I sing as loud and as proud as I can. It doesn't matter if it's 20 below, that sun roof will be open on my way home if need be. The nights when it's been emotional turmoil, I cry all the way home. I used to live five minutes from work so I got a good little cry in but now I live 35 minutes away and sometimes am lucky to get two cries in before getting home. By then I'm exhausted and ready to wind down.
Then there are those rare, "sometimes" nights that send me home anxious and physically sick to my stomach. Like I said, these are rare. At least for me they are. It takes a lot to really "get" to me but recently it did. Sometimes you just have to stop on the side of the road and leave your feelings right there. These are the nights I need to sleep in my work shirt. I can not get comfort any other way when sleep finally comes. And sometimes that takes days.
The percentage of days that I cry going to or coming home from work is much greater than the days I get to sing to the stars. Sometimes I will hear a song on the radio and it will trigger a memory of something that has happened at work. This is why I usually don't like to listen to country music. That stuff is tragic for bad news and heart break!! Sometimes it's the overload of days past that catches up with me. I try to outrun those moments but it's not always easy. You know the saying "You can run but you can't hide." It's true.
I can drive down a country road, the interstate, or even a highway in my area and see exactly where I had been on scene with a deputy and remember any horrific detail from that call. I will remember the anxiety I felt when we were going there, the mad rush to do anything that can be of help, and what the scene looked like. Sometimes I can remember distinct smells from a call. Gasoline, oil, grass, fire, and sometimes even death. That's why I like to do ride-alongs. For the rush of the business.
You are probably thinking that I shouldn't be riding along to calls if it is going to affect me but I live for it. I love all the feelings that go with this job; even the bad feelings. If I didn't know what bad felt like, how would I appreciate all the good?
All dispatchers have calls that infuriate us. 9-1-1 hang ups from a phone that can ONLY call 9-1-1 or an unattended child playing with a phone. While I am on the phone trying to ask your 1 year old child to give the phone to mommy or daddy, someone else is needing to call me on that 9-1-1 line. For the love of bacon, if your old phone has a battery in it, it can call 9-1-1. It does not have to be hooked up to any service. Read this, let this soak in, understand it and be proactive about it. I could go on all day about the different types of calls we get but I'm not going to do that either. Aint nobody got time for that!
I am pretty good about handling stuff, I think. I have a few calls that have bothered me over the years. I had a guy call 9-1-1 because he was having a hard time breathing. I could barely get his address from him and the more time passed, the worse he was getting. I stayed on the line with him and he tried to talk between gasps and gulps. I kept telling him not to talk but to concentrate on breathing until an ambulance got to him. It took a couple of minutes but he said his wife and children were upstairs asleep and he didn't want them to know what was going on. Seriously! Sympathy and heart break for this man and then I was pissed off. See how those emotions turn at a moments notice??? While I did let EMS know this information, I could not keep a promise to this man that his family wasn't going to be woken up.
Once, I was on the phone with a guy that had fallen asleep driving down the interstate. He hit a cable barrier and had called 9-1-1. He was trying to get his bearings to tell me where he was at when he was hit by another car. Another sound I will never, ever forget. I have never wanted to be transported to a different place more than I did that night. Luckily for him, things turned out to be okay. It probably took longer for me to recover than it did for him.
Another time, we had a terrible snow storm and I was working the overnight shift. It was the worst snowstorm since I started working here actually. A lady that did not speak much English kept calling 9-1-1 because she and her baby were stuck in a truck on a county road that wasn't in our county but close to it. I can't even remember how many times I paged and re-paged services to try to get to her. No law enforcement or fire department could get through the drifts.
It is a terrible feeling to not be able to get help to someone. It took several hours and it felt like days, but the neighboring county was able to get somebody to her and her child and get them to warmth and safety. I'm not sure if it was on my blog or on my Facebook where I posted about the show 9-1-1 on Fox and there was an earthquake and they were having to tell people they could not get help to them. It brought me to tears. I was sobbing.
I will do just about anything to get help to anybody that I can in an emergency situation. In the past twelve months, I have had way too many calls where I can not find enough emergency services to cover what I need. It's not that we didn't have enough services; it is that so much was going on, there wasn't enough to go around. And that terrifies me for those that need it.
I know I'm rambling. I need to wrap this up. For those of you that are friends with a dispatcher, keep in mind that we don't usually want to talk about work when we are out with you or are on the phone with you (and if we answer the phone, consider yourself lucky because we get sick of that thing). We like to keep those conversations close with our work families. If you want your dispatcher friend to flourish and be mentally healthy, talk to them about anything but work and IF they want to talk about something that happened there, let them come to you and just listen. Don't ask them!
And don't...I repeat DO NOT use your dispatcher friends to your own advantage. It will bite you in the ass. It is not our jobs to keep our friends out of jail. We like to think we are friends with people smarter than that.
And just in case you don't know this, when something awful happens at work, we have a chance to go to something called a debriefing, where we can talk about our feelings connected with the call; talk about things that we can't just talk to anyone and everyone about. We just don't all choose to do it this way because for some of us...okay for this dispatcher...it makes it all that much worse.
And there is just one more thing I want to add to this post. This is going to sound preachy. If you don't like it, leave. Don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya cause it's getting real here at the end.
You are not invincible and if you die behind the wheel, for any reason, you are leaving a lot of people hurting in this world. Parents, children, spouses, family, friends and so much more. Distracted driving is killing us. Literally. Put your phones away and concentrate on the road. Your kids are cute but that Snapchat you are taking while driving down the road isn't worth yours or their life.
AND, I can not stress this enough...if you feel you must drink beyond your limit, do the right thing and get a ride home with a sober driver. It is not fair to risk the lives of other people because of your ego. I think we all know how we would feel if our loved one got hurt, or worse, from a drunk driver so the next time you are out drinking, think about it and do the right thing.
I'm off my soapbox and my fingerprints have been worn off the ends of my fingers. Stick a fork in me, I'm done!
In the words of Luke Bryan, "I believe most people are good."
Thanks for listening <3
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