A Lonely Place
There's nothing so great as moving to a brand-new comm center with all the latest gadgets! On the other hand, there's nothing so lonely as a comm center that's been abandoned. We recently visited a police-fire comm center that had moved to new quarters--and left behind everything but the dispatchers and their headsets.
The Motorola consoles were still in place, the furniture intact and papers looked as if they had just been dropped. There were newspapers and magazines still in the drawers, and items still posted on partitions between the consoles. The comm center locker room was cleaned out, but still had lots of left-over items. The supervisors' office had all the essential items moved, but that still left lots of binders and other out-of-date reference materials. Behind the consoles, the wiring was mostly intact, but there were odd connections missing where equipment had been removed. All of the CAD terminals were lined up on the consoles, since all new equipment had been purchased for the new comm center.
