Law Dispatcher

It’s time for another one of those 911 stories.  Not all are bad and some can acutally be side-splitting funny.  One thing is for sure…people do some really dumb things.  Once you become a 911 operator, you realize that people had it right back in the olden days.  Let me explain…there were no seatbelt laws, no bicycle helmet laws, people rode in the back of pick-up trucks and there was no such things as knee pads and elbow pads for kids on skatboards.  Because these items were non-existant, accidents involving people’s stupidity led to the thinning of the idiot population.  Now, I don’t mean to be insensitive but really…you had to be tough to survive or you died.  Most people used their brain before they engaged in stupid behavior.  Now days, we’ve enacted laws, created items, and basically boxed ourselves into a “safe world” that we now share with everyone else…including the idiots.  As these idiots have propagated,  our ratio of sane to insane is very much disproportionate.  I blame a lot of this on the “higher levels” of education that we insist our children obtain,  yet, we as society have failed to teach them “common sense”.  Case in point:  My youngest child tells me that she and her father have gone out to a piece of land that they own to spend some time maintaining it.  Her father put up a swing (hanging from a tree) for them to play on.  The kids had gathered a large pile of moss and use that as a landing pad for their flying leaps off of the swing.  Sounds like fun to me.  However, when one of the three children, take his leap off and lands nicely on the moss pile, he doesn’t think about the fact that the swing is still swinging and it comes back and nails him squarely on the head.  30 years ago, we would have said something to the effect that it knocked some commonsense into him but nowdays…OH NO!  Darling little Johnny got smacked in the head by the swing who was just doing what swings do and now we must do something about that!  So the father issues a rulling that the kids must now wear a helmet when they swing.  My question is…how far are we willing to entangle ourselves up in rules and regulations just to protect the idiots???  Whatever happened to living and learning from our mistakes?  I have probably the greatest job security of anyone in the world because I know that with the idiot population growing, the 911 line is their only prayer of survival.

Now on to the story after my little rant…

We dispatch for several different agencies and as such, when we train, we train to dispatch for them all albeit they have their own little quirks.  911 dispatchers are just normal human beings that need the occasional potty or meal break and when they need a break, they need another qualified individual to come relieve them from their post as in the case that happened a while back in our center.  The relieving dispatcher take his place at the main radio of one particular agency.  He receives a transmission from a road unit doing a traffic stop.  After the appropriate information is given and recorded, the officer requests the dispatcher to make contact with the owner of the vehicle to see if they know where their vehicle is.  The dispatcher made the call to the residence and a female answers the phone verifying her identity as the wife of the registered owner.  When asked if she had a new black Lexus, she  replied no, that she did not have a Lexus and had never had a new vehicle to begin with.  This information was then relayed to the officer.  The officer proceeds to let the vehicle and it’s driver go on.  The call was cleared and eventually the original dispatcher returns from their break.  The relieving dispatcher then moves on to the next agency dispatcher to give them a break.  While he is maintaining his post, he realizes that a family disturbance call has come in.  As he voices the call over the radio, it dawns on him that it is the same address as the registered owner of the black Lexus.  Hmm.  What’s going on here?

One of the most frustrating things about being a 911 operator/dispatcher is we rarely know how the story ends and unless we make contact with the responding officer, we won’t ever find out; however, this one peaked the dispatcher’s interest and he made contact with the responder and here’s the rest of the story.

After dearest wife received the phone call from us about a new black Lexus, she informed her darling husband of what had just happened.  I can just imagine his face as she speaks.  He’s about to go blanch white.  She explains the conversation between the dispatcher and herself and now he must explain what little dirty secret he has been keeping.  You see, the new black Lexus was a lovely Christmas gift to his mistress…that the wife knew nothing about (both the car and the mistress).  Just to add company to misery…the crack addict son of the now fearing-for-his-life husband, had taken the Lexus and was going to use it as a crack rental.  An observant officer puts two and two together  and figures not all is right with a high school kid driving a new Lexus in an area that he shouldn’t be in.  And thus, you can only surmise why 911 was called for a family disturbance.

As Paul Harvey would have said, “And now you know the rest of the story.”

Be sure of this:  Your sins will find you out!