by Linda Olmstead
Summer may be over, but the Silly Season isn't through with us yet. Sure, there are nutty calls in colder weather, but doesn't it seem like most of the truly odd or laughable situations occur when it's warm outside?
We had a sudden and surprising hot spell after the turn of the season, with temperatures in the high 90s. Shortly before 2 p.m., one of our dispatchers received a rather startling 911 call; the guy's first words were: "I'm sweating my ass off in the back of this cop car!!" Okie-doke, that gave her a moment of pause.
She determined he was in custody, in a patrol car (with his cell phone) and asked where the police officer was."Oh, in the house with my girlfriend." Okay, now we've got some colors with which to paint that picture. [grin] She asks him for the address and city, tells him she'll "See what she can do." Then she calls the appropriate PSAP and relates the tale to the dispatcher over there. The caller didn't call back, so their officer must have attended to his sweltering prisoner before too much more time passed.
Remember that amusing office placard that stated "Plan Ahead," where the text is too large for the available space and the "D" kinda dangles off the end of the second word? One of my favorite, heartless sayings is: "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
Prior to the guy in the back of the hot cop car, our previous Can Ya Beat This? Incident occurred on a late Saturday afternoon. The caller was a truly distraught woman who absolutely had to have the fire department or 'someone' come down and open the dry cleaning establishment for her.
They hadn't warned her they closed early on Saturdays!!! Our dispatcher made sure there wasn't any fire and finally determined the emergency: the lady needed to pick up her daughter's wedding dress for her wedding the next day and the store had closed at 2 p.m.
She walks her through the following steps: Did you ask what their Saturday hours were? No. Is there a sign on the door stating the business hours? Yes. And what time does it say they close on Saturdays? 2 p.m. "The wedding's tomorrow and they're not open on Sundays at all!!!"
Help Enroute
Well, the local agency with geographic jurisdiction for that incident told me they eventually assisted the woman. (I called them a few minutes later, feeling guilty about the hard line "911 is for Emergencies" stance demonstrated by our dispatcher. Lady-with-a-cell-phone hadn't taken too long to made some additional calls on non-emergency lines, it seems.)
Whew! It would have been a shame to bear the responsibility for having ruined someone's wedding plans, right? Sometimes we can really relate to comedian Bill Engvall's stand-up routine about stupid people: "Here's your sign, lady!"
I've mentioned wildlife before in this column, either as sorts of unofficial mascots or in relation to various incidents we've handled. With the change of season, we've now got bats swooping about through the parking lot at dusk. (The swallows are long gone.) Some of the dispatchers find'em interesting and some of'em are creeped out by the leathery-winged flying rodents. [grin] Hey, without a bug zapper outside the back door, the security lights just seem to draw insectile delectables.
And now we've got another mouse (or two, maybe) setting up housekeeping in the Center. Back when we fed a stray cat or two against administrative injunction, we didn't have Evidence of Mouse in our kitchen. [sigh] Time for a call to the exterminator. Alternatives: poison, and something crawls somewhere inconvenient to die, creating a smellier situation than the occasional forgotten bit of fruit in the refrigerator crisper, or traps, which make this startling snap - and the resultant 'eek' causes consternation amongst the graveyard shift dispatchers. Either way, it's icky.
Lane Closed
As the warmer seasons wane, road construction is picking up. I guess they want to beat the rainy weather; makes sense. Unlike the programmable message sign warning motorists of the diminished number of lanes ahead of them, at one of our regular sites.
It was after hours, and the workers weren't due back until the next day. A helpful caller reported the situation to us: apparently the word "Closed" for that lane closure was not spelled correctly. Not really an emergency, but it looked sorta goofy. We notified the public works superintendent and he agreed to send someone to fix the sign. (Nice guy; we call him out at all hours for stuff that is usually pretty urgent.)
Last month I reported the wrangle between the telephone company and our technicians about calls being dropped from recordings, and how that finally got solved. Well, they fixed it all right. We haven't lost a single telephone conversation since. Great, huh? [ahem] It all had to do with the sensitivity of this versus the line volume of that, and the change of equipment some time ago and all that bother.
A few days after the phone techs got it all straightened out, I was disturbed to discover-while duplicating a tape for court-that we were certainly not losing anything. Matter of fact, we were catching every single thing said in the Comm Center, because all the phone instruments were "live." Or "hot." Or whatever you want to call it-they were constantly recording; every single line captured everything said, 24 hours a day. Statements made in loud voices were recorded on more than one recorder channel, as other phones picked them up, too.
Oops.
Full Cartridge
I told the on-duty dispatchers the bad news and posted a notice with real big letters so nobody'd miss it. I work the swing shift, so they were gonna have to live with the situation until our regular phone technician responded the next day during business hours. (It had only been a few days, so the fact that the logging recorder DAT cartridges were filling up faster than usual hadn't really triggered anyone's suspicions yet.)
However, the night shift told me they had fun talking really loudly at various times to see if they could get all the channel indicators on the recorder display to flash red at the same time.
First fix took care of the phones that weren't signed on for service. (Amazing to me that a phone that wasn't even signed on could still record everything audible around it!) We happily believed the technician until I had another opportunity to check the recordings for another incident. It wasn't long, actually; I always have a backlog of requests for recordings and try to chug my way through them whenever I get the chance. Daily, if nothing else gets in my way.
(I was later asked if I'd heard "anything good." Well, I hadn't heard anything I hadn'terrrheard before.) [ahem] Nothing worth busting anybody's chops about, anyway.
Trust Me
While we're on the subject of tapes for court, and with this "Silly Season" in mind, I have to share this: one public defender requested a copy of an incident I'd already duplicated for the DA's office. I suggested they obtain a copy of that cassette through the discovery process. Ohhh nooooooo, the attorney "didn't trust the DA's tape." Huh? Well, that's odd, since I'm the one that duplicated it for them, and there's a certification statement at the beginning of each tape I duplicate We worked it out (I didn't have to make a whole new one for them), but I was certainly bemused by their suspicion.
It so happens that I do occasionally come across amusing incidents captured on tape as I duplicate something else entirely. There are some horses out of their pasture and they're galloping along the road, in the lanes. Definite need for response. The only available unit at the time was the shift sergeant, who decided he'd go check out the situation.
I wasn't duplicating that incident onto cassette, but I did have to listen to the whole thing as it unfolded around the incident under review. Right about where he'd been sent, he discovered four horses trotting in the roadway, all right. Very casually, he told Dispatch, "They're northbound not yielding to my patrol unit."
The dispatcher tried to keep the amusement out of her voice (after all, there was this other incident going on at the same time, you know: the one I was duplicating for court).
She repeated his transmission, equally as casual. A second unit cleared a traffic stop about that time and advised he'd respond to assist. The dispatcher acknowledged this and requested an updated location for the sergeant. He reported he was "in a slow pursuit, about 10 to 30 mph" with his latest location. The assisting unit joined him and advised Dispatch "we'll take secondary [position] and call it."
Hoof Bail
The incident then transformed into something very similar to one of our pursuits, albeit very low-key. Everybody sounded very serious with just a slight break in their voices as they fought incipient laughter. Eventually, the four horses broke into a gallop-reported as "taking hoof bail"-and evaded the patrol units by crossing over into another field through a break in the fence alongside the roadway. Then they encountered the opposite fence line and couldn't go any further; the chase was over.
Just before I was able to finish the recording of the incident I needed to duplicate for court-and a couple of minutes after I thought the fun stuff was all over-the sergeant requested license information on subject "Mr. Ed, DOB 7/27/50." I'm proud to report our dispatcher advised that his subject had no prior DUI arrests but there was "some indication of previous speeding."
The sergeant informed her they weren't going to need a cage car because it was a "cite and release" situation...then added, "with an additional charge of litteringif you know what I mean."
Did you know a "spill proof" mug does not prevent a listener from snorting one's swallow of coffee? I had some mopping up to do after that denouement. The sergeant cleared the Horses in Roadway call with a request for his CAD log number-protocol for all "handled" incidents-and from my vantage point, days after the event, and tucked away in the tape vault, I was lucky none of the evidence of my amusement stained the copy of the CAD log used to locate all the pertinent moments of the official tape request.
Incidents like that I find on tape sure make me miss my days working the midnight shift.
Happy to be here, proud to serve.
Linda
November, 1999
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