Sunday, October 31, 2010

Peanut butter and Jam smoothie

So yesterday I went in for an early shift, which meant being at work for 05:30, yucky. I am not a morning person at all, however when I am tired I tend to get hyper first then sluggish, then hyper again. It also means that there can be a few immature conversations on the floor for a bit. There should be a warning to the public, don't have emergencies before 11:00 am.

I get there, and a few people from my watch have already logged on but there are few from the previous shifts looking as awake as I feel. I have a stainless steel travel mug and they point and say, 'you coffee, oh shit, I'm leaving'. Okay so maybe the one time I had coffee I was almost literately bouncing off the walls. I assured them it wasn't coffee but a smoothie I had made the night before for the morning. However I had been out of my normal ingredients so I had to improvise. In the end it turned out tasting like a peanut butter and jam sandwich, which wasn't so bad but it got some looks from my coworkers.

I sit down and the first thing the person I'm relieving says is, 'you smell like shampoo and *sniff* *sniff* cherries." My body wash is cherry seed and mint, shampoo is peach something. At this point I have gone from hyper to sluggish again so I sit at my computer and start answering the phone. Its an officer and he's calling to log off, however I uh failed.

Me: Hello Officer *slurred words*
Officer DL: Have you been drinking? Show me some ID.
Me: Yes.
Officer DL: Really?
Me: Yes and it tastes like a peanut butter and jam sandwich.
Officer DL: What? Oh honey drink the good stuff.
Me: But I like peanut butter and jam.

Conversation goes on like that for a little bit then I log him off and send him home. On the weekends we are allowed to wear jeans and some people even have blankets. It's cold in there! The girl beside me is just as tired as I am and says she's allergic to my smoothie and to dump it out. I can tell she is joking cause she does more then me and she has the smile she makes every time she tries to pull your leg. I told her I was allergic to her face. At this moment Supervisor Plaid Jacket is walking by. He stops, shakes his head and mumbles something about the maturity of 911. I'm mature. But it's not even six in the morning! Don't expect intellectual conversations that early. Maybe after a few drinks (if i drank) but not before six. Hell not before 11.

First 911 call.

Tired woman: I just got woken up.
Me: And okay what is your emergency? What woke you up?
Tired woman: Police siren. Tell them to shut if off.
Me: Really? Uh ... no.
Tired woman: But it woke me up. It's only six in the morning and now I won't be able to go back to sleep and I'll be tired all day.
Me: Well Mame are you calling from *secret address*, and is your phone number *secret*?
Tired woman: Well yeah but don't send them back here. I want to go to sleep.
Me: This isn't an emergency I'm taking you off of my 911 line.
Tired woman: It will be an emergency when I go to work looking like shit. *Hangs up*

Thus started my day. It was long but I gotta admit it had it's funny moments. Now tonight ... Halloween. Everyone be safe out there.

Monday, October 25, 2010

A cold and the conflict.

Haven't posted in a little bit, trying to get better after this rotten cold and the horrible test of self that comes once a month. Last night shift wasn't too bad, actually it was great. Problem is I sounded like a man, friggen cold. One of my buddies in the ambulance dispatch, Dispatcher GH, had at first pretended not to recognize my voice and then proceeded to laugh at me. Great. I told him I'd arrest him and he threatened to take me to the hospital. Since I hate hospitals, it was a stalemate. At least he made me laugh though, I had needed at that point.

As the night progressed my grammar went down the poop chute and I had my coworkers in stitches. Turns out anything at 2 in the morning can be funny, so when I heard them laughing I had to really wonder what I had just said. Like "What plate is the province from." I actually didn't get what was wrong with that, couldn't understand why that one was funny till this morning. I have two supervisors but they tend to only work one at a time where the other is always on vacation. I told them it's like having divorced parents, two separate rules no matter who you're with. Supervisor JP is by far the nicest but Supervisor Plaid Jacket definitely wears the pants in the relationship. Anyways Supervisor JP was in last night and he bought a hot chocolate for my cold. Yey. He then pretended he had just been infected with my cold and proceeded to die a horrible painful death. Yey. Hot choco and a show.

Not to sound like a drama ridden teenage girl here, but there IS one dispatcher, dispatcher 2face she will be referred to, who is out to get me. How our centre has it, is that there are call takers (moi mostly) that answer 911, non emerg police/fire, alarms and ambulance lines. We talk to the great public and enter calls into the CAD. Our dispatchers then read the calls and talk to the Po po. We're all in the same room and that's great cause at any moment a call taker can get up and sit at a dispatcher spot (if they have to go to the bathroom). Most people are crossed trained, I'm getting there. I'm partially trained but we have really short staff so that's sort of on hold for now. Anyways, Dispatcher 2face tears apart all my calls that go to her zone that she dispatches for. I don't mean read and anaylze I mean, she goes and sees if she can stretch anything into a mistake, see if she can find anything I can get written up for. It's stressful putting calls to her cause you know she's going to either send you a message, mess up your call or stand up and say "why did you do this? Did you realize that you're wrong?" all for ever one to hear. Last night was an irker.

I had this call where 2 young women had been walking down a residential area at about midnight and a car had been circling around the block essentially looking at them. Nothing said and the car never stopped but it had happened 5 times in five minutes so the girls were freaked. I get the 911 call and I map the house they are in front of. They are dead center in a bunch of houses and there are no businesses close. Just houses and a bunch of trees. Great. I tell them to stay in front of the house they are at and go up the driveway away from the street. I put in the call for the address they are at and wait for 2face to send me a message. Well she does. She wants to know why I have them stopped there and they should keep on walking to where ever they are going and police will meet up with them. Uhhh ... 1, don't you know how much random violent crime we've had the last 2 weeks, not to mention the last 2 nights? How many weapon attacks, robberies and assaults? 2, I want to know where the hell they are exactly in case this goes from creepy to criminal in a heartbeat. So I stood my ground and my callers stayed where they were. She got huffy about it and sure enough went to the super after it was done. He never came and saw me but I was ready to go in there like it was court and justify why I did what I did. I had told the caller if anyone stopped from that vehicle and got out to start screaming like a banshee and pound on the door of the home. I had made sure there was a vehicle in the driveway so there would be someone home. Not only could she be allowed inside this could provide a deterrent. So she was as safe as I could make her while she waited for police and not walking down a street with a half inkling as to where she was. Police found my caller and her friend and drove them home, vehicle wasn't found but everyone was safe. My thing.

2Face has gotten so bad on some calls, questioning everything I do, that it makes me wonder about what I am doing on all the calls. Dispatcher Grumpy though solved that by walking up to me, while she was right there, and said "Kat you know your calls are great, she's just crazy." He then gave a smile while she stormed away. I told him he was my hero and he proceeded to mess up my hair.

I don't have a car. It's a fact I can't change right now. However I get off at 3 am and that has led to some interesting moments. My co-workers HATE it when I walk home, it's not a bad bad area but its not great either. We've come to an understanding though, either one of them drives me home or they send the cops. They've done it before. I've once tried to even sneak out and Sergeant CP caught me threw me in his truck and drove me home. Of course that comes with a lecture though, better then cuffs I guess. He's also taken to sending me messages on my computer around 230, asking me how I'm getting home. So last night Dispatcher Grumpy drove me home and it was cute because he acts all tough like he doesn't care about anything, but he waited in his truck until I got past the secure doors of my building and into the elevator. I loves my job, I loves my co-workers (most of them) and I loves our boys and girls. I just hate this cold.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Tomato Projectiles and Light reading

I will start off by saying this is no way a confession, lol, this is no way of saying it was me at all. I have 2 small tomato plants on my balcony that have been giving me lots of little cherrys , much more then I expected. Well there had been two that were green still on the plant, which at this point is dead. I figure these guys weren't going to get any bigger and might stand a chance to ripen if I brought them inside. Easy enough, pluck them off and then I took a moment to look over at my view, which is pretty sweet. I'm overlooking into the harbour and the large town of Crazy Town when somehow, they fall from my hand. I'm thinkin oh well, there goes that idea, watching them fall. My luck. Somehow, someone up there hates me or this old lady who's walkin underneath where my balcony is.

*Thump* *Thump*

Oh shit! I holler out sorry and then run back in my apartment hoping she didn't see me. I'm six floors up and wondering if those tomatoes were frozen from our recent temperature plummet. So ... feeling guilty and wondering if I gave the old lady a concussion I ambled over to the balcony. I had this vision of this lady on the ground, occasionally twitching, and cursing ... damn ... tomatoes.

I look over and I don't see anyone. Sweet. Look around the parking lot, still no one. Good so if she was hobbling slowly away I'd see her. In the clear ... so far. If the cops come to my door, however, it wasn't me, never mind those tomato plants on the balcony. Maybe I'll be lucky and get the canuck version of Lunch Money. (The officer Mamma fargo is currently doing her best to train in http://mommafargo.blogspot.com/)

Besides thinking about if I'm going to have assault with a weapon charges put on me, I got some nice light reading to do. The powers that be at work want to change our SOP (Standard Operating Policies ... I think.) which are pretty much all the rules and such that we play the 911 game by. They email everyone a copy of the new draft, cool, they want us to read it while we take calls ... oh ... okay, it's 97 pages long ... fuck. No can do. So someone got the bright idea to print it off not realizing it was a novel. Hee, I have since borrowed the copy and taken it home to go over it. Some of the stuff they want to change is nuts. I now understand why they were wanting us to read it between calls, hoping no one would or just skim it. There a lot of things in there that I'm just shaking my head at, one being we are not allowed to talk over a person. I get the don't be rude part, don't cut people of yadda yadda yadda. But when you have people screaming at the top of their lungs that their 8 day child has stopped breathing, you can't wait to politely interject your humble opinion for a medic. There is a right way and time to talk over a person so that it's not rude but controlling the call. Nother change, we cannot say squat until we've confirmed phone # and address. Not squat. Pretty much from where I'm at and from other people who have read it, it's written so that at any time management can haul us into the office for policy and go, 'ah ah ah, naughty Kat, look you've broken our ridiculous SOP Suspension no pay for you'. Then we get threat calls and Kat gets fired. Doesn't look good for me. I'm hoping enough people voice their ... displeasure with this and get the draft SOP into the recycle bin. As a novel it tanked.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Oh god, just don't let me drive!

So I didn't sleep much last night, at all, maybe three-four hours tops. When I did sleep I had this major weird dream that was also pretty funny.

I'm driving a car, which is weird on it's own because I'm terrified of driving and hate the thought. I know that in this dream my dad had just spent the entire afternoon giving me lessons so now I am on my own. I can see this from above, like me personally is in a helicopter watching me driver this stupid little silver car. Next thing I know this highway, which was straight, starts having all these super weird lanes, intersections and friggen loop de loops! What the hell! That doesn't go over well and I super crash my car. Not even just, exchange information and contact your insurance, it was totaled. I remember running up to the car and going, this is not good, this is not good. I actually crashed into the building and two of my coworkers were inside, a little freaked out. The first thing out my mouth to them was 'whoops'. Looking at my car I was still thinking, It'll be alright, It'll be alright. Looking inside though the front hood was pretty much merged with the cab of the car and the windshield glass had all these spiderweb cracks in them. My next thought was, nope, I'm dead.

A coworker comes up to me, she is the feisty one and shakes her head. I figure I must have taken her out too, so I best apologize later today. There is this guy that comes to you when you die and essentially takes your left pointer finger and singes it with a lighter to mark that your dead. Great. Didn't hurt though. Then you have to sit in a wheelchair and someone wheels you up to heaven.

Front doors of heaven aren't bad, you go in and you wheel around to the reception desk. The person wheeling you, (which was fuckin Jacks!) in my case tells them your name, date of birth and then wheels you into the main room. Oh and this point, you are naked but no one seems to care, at all.

The first room you go into you ditch the wheelchair and have to pick out clothes. I remember saying 'but I don't like tye dye'. I pick out clothes I like and let me say this. Heaven is like Walmart if it had a hotel department. We find my room which down this freaking long hall. Out in the Main area there are shelves with games, lots of stuff to do. There are couches, tvs, ping pong table everything. That's when Jacks leaves me, says she has other people to wheel in. (Now I know what you really do for a job.)

Heaven also has this major huge buffet table with possibly everything you would ever even think of eating. There was this girl there that seemed expressionless so I tried to make her laugh. I pointed, "Look deviled eggs!" No response. My material was not working. I probably would have enjoyed heaven more too if I was in a better mood. So since I'm there I start making the most awesome sandwich ever. Then my grandfather walks up behind me and starts talking about all the people admitted to heaven today. He also says that my dad was sad and he needed someone. That's about the point that I woke up. Now my gramps is dead in reality as well and I've never met him but I've seen pictures. Needless to say my dad and I are now having lunch on Thursday and he's even driving me to work today which I must get ready for.

So when I get to work I need to apologize to my coworker for totally taking her out, though it wasn't my fault. There was freaking loop de loops! I'll be fine, just don't let me drive!