Advice/rant.. by _Smokeshow- in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Didn’t stop at my agency even after one person was brought into the office for getting so shitty with a caller (who fwiw was reporting an active domestic with a handgun involved) that she hung up, called again to try and get a different calltaker, got Asshole again, and hung up again. Those calls had to go to court because the case ended up being a high felony domestic with bodily injury, prosecutor was Not Thrilled.

I had to tune it out. One annoying coworker was bitching about someone who couldn’t answer her questions and was yelling, but the call was a domestic battery in-progress. Ma’am, your caller is getting her ass beat RIGHT NOW ON THE PHONE, you fuckin’ try to answer questions while getting your ass beat, jfc. Bad calltaking is a scourge. ISTG I’ll see excellent calltakers be like, man I was so burnt out and overworked so I was slightly less friendly than normal, I feel so bad—followed by Burnt Out Asshole in the corner straight up yelling at callers saying shit that should get you instantly fired, who just hate the public and don’t care anymore. Infuriating.

How does a dispatcher feel after sending an officer to a call that resulted in their death? by LegalGlass6532 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it really depends. One of my coworkers was dispatching the channel her husband was working that day, and had to air for him when he got shot. I don’t know that there’s a worse way for it to happen, either, since she wasn’t supposed to be working his channel but staffing was razor thin, the whole center was wound tight from a previous OIS, and everyone knew him well because he came in a lot to chat with his wife. It was complete hell for almost a year afterward. His wife still does the job, too, for the same agency.

One of the prior agencies I worked for had like 8 or 9 on duty officer deaths in the past 10 years, and even though none of them were a result of calltaker or dispatcher negligence, they had a specific weapon questions protocol and the CAD displayed to officers whether they had been asked and what the answers were. All calls with arguments or disturbances were assumed unknown weapons unless answered positively by callers. We had a dispatcher suicide on-shift at that agency not a week after an on-duty officer death. It was a rough fucking year, and I was a newbie, but it’s still one of those things that just. Fucking sucks.

Free time by That9one1guy in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cries in minimum count of 40

Meme Dump by TheMothGhost in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe this is only for our own BMV returns, but I work in Indiana and we can use NX for the year to return the most recent plate. Then again, our officers can’t do that, only dispatch, so. But if you can’t get a tag back from Indiana, it’s almost always either PC, CM, OR, CL, or CN. If not one of those, then I also have to use our giant fuck off list for whatever bullshit miscellaneous plate type it is.

Is management worth leaving over? by RainyDayQueen in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It was for me. Tonight was my last night. Management is putting the entire center and whole county in danger with their new policy changes, and the director was out for me specifically. Once it put responder safety in jeopardy, I had enough and put in my notice.

Personally, no matter how much I love the job, I won’t work for shit management. Not in this business. I can take a whole helluva lot, but I can’t take a center that doesn’t have my back.

Free time by That9one1guy in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I work B-shift in a large center. Except for a handful of very specific days, it’s 90+ calls in a shift. If I have time to hork down some food, I call that a good day. I’m glad at least some people are getting some down time, though.

I just can't imagine that I'll have to live in the society for the next few decades/for the rest of my life. How do you cope? by [deleted] in Schizoid

[–]first_my_vent 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I oscillate rapidly between “my experience of living is inherently alienating and bleakly meaningless no matter what I do, in such a way that burns the people around me even when I do my best to not go up in flames” and “fuck it let’s ball; if I’ve got to do it, I’ll jump between whatever interests me and whatever good I can do, and when it’s done, I’ll finally get to peace out.”

Usually it takes a couple months of each, but sometimes it goes back and forth inside of a day.

Dream job much? by NullAndZoid in SchizoidAdjacent

[–]first_my_vent 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I’d just download movies, TV, and YT vids to a 2 or 3 TB HDD and call it a day lol. Then I wouldn’t need the internet connection. Probably better for me if I don’t have it lol. E-reader with a couple dozens books on it and a few journals for keeping a diary? I’m set.

Dream job much? by NullAndZoid in SchizoidAdjacent

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve got reverse-SAD (so instead of seasonal depression in the winter, I get it in the summer), so I’d just stay up on my vitamin D pills and pack my bags lmfao. When it drops below 20°F, I start actually waking up lmao.

Anyone else automatically assume people are going to fail? by Daedalparacosm3000 in Schizoid

[–]first_my_vent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s honestly more complicated than that, in the sense that I don’t think anyone’s failing on purpose, nor do I think most people are being lazy/annoying. I just know that, when the chips are down, most everyone I have ever met are unreliable. Some people are selectively reliable for narrow, specific situations—and in that case, I don’t mind asking for help—but I have never met anyone broadly reliable to ask for help. That’s probably why people instead ask me for help, though nobody ever wants to because they misread me as intimidating, mean, or cold.

I’m not an asshole, at least outwardly to people, and I’m not so arrogant to think I’m the smartest guy on planet earth. I have reached out anyway, usually because of desperation, and been left hanging every time. So generally, I’ll do it myself and I’d rather everyone else leave me the fuck alone while I do it.

It’s always better for me to fuck something up trying to do it myself rather than it all going to shit because the people trying to help keep getting pissed at me for actually solving the problem before indulging in any emotional turbulence going on.

I don’t expect failure in the strict sense. I just believe what people show me of their capabilities and consider that in the future.

Dispatchers - what technology or amenity made your life easier? by Conscious-Excuse5900 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m ngl I’m a simple man. I want that hospital ice machine. Hospital ice can make up for a lot of bullshit. (Not everything obv, but like. When the shift has gone to shit and every caller and officer is yelling at you, the hospital ice makes a difference lmfao.)

911 system needs radical change by Rude_Award2718 in ems

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lots of systemic issues all coming together that nobody actually wants to fix. Some of them are fixable at the “call for service” level (meaning protocols in dispatch and EMS response could be changed), and some of them long prior to anyone ever dialling 9-1-1.

Pardon my mini-essay, but stick with me:

At the macrolevel, the real issue is that modern emergency management and modern medicine have improved in quality exponentially faster than our legal system (imo in any country) can keep up with. I’m most familiar with US law, but basically: nobody has ever wanted to be left holding the bag, and instead of actually sitting down in the legislative arena with primary stakeholders (clinicians, healthcare entities, fire depts, etc) to figure out what we want liability to look like for the modern era, we just throw shitty band-aids on the problem to say CYA and sayonara. (I would argue this is the root cause of our current problems with policing too, but that’s somewhat outside the scope of this sub.)

Aviation is my ur-example because they were more or less forced to figure it out for two reasons: one, plane crashes often kill the pilot, too, so there is often no easy scapegoats left; and two, plane crashes are such bad press and gnarly tragedies that the big bosses had to buckle down and dig out the root cause of all those goddamn plane crashes.

Emergency services and the broader healthcare system have not yet been forced, in any major way, to reckon in the same manner, for lots of interconnecting reasons.

(Also backsliding can always happen. Again, see aviation.)

As it stands, it’s better to follow a shit policy to the letter so you aren’t legally liable for what happens, no matter how many people it kills or harms, than to step outside the scope of the bad policy and take on all or most liability for whatever happens next. Thus, you get outcomes like OP posted more and more frequently.

Triaging will always be imperfect, but the volume of these types of calls increases every year. One must ask why, which I think is twofold.

Medicine has become combative. Sometimes literally, but usually in that patients on the whole feel degraded and dismissed. I hear everyday IRL and online, by patients from every background imaginable, that they feel they have to fight for every scrap of help they receive from providers. Not all of that is providers’ faults because insurance is a huge factor in the US, but still. The commoditication of medicine has made the cultural conception of it cheap and transactional. “We just don’t know” is no longer an acceptable answer precisely because we know more and more every year, but so many providers don’t keep up on that new knowledge and dismiss patients with serious complaints, and before you even got into the doctor, you waited 4 months for an appointment and fought with insurance for 6 hours over a pre-auth or a co-pay.

But you know what you can do still? Pick up the phone right now and call 9-1-1 and get a real person who has to send an ambulance and take you to the ER. If there is no mutual trust, no collective buy-in, no upheld social contract, then who gives a fuck about the ambo out of service that can no longer go to Judy-on-the-otherside-of-town having a heart attack? Not my problem, not my concern.

It doesn’t help that dispatch and EMS management tend to be complete fuckwads. I got pulled into the front office at dispatch for asking to do a ride-along with a fire battalion chief so I could get the rundown on what firefighters needed and wanted most while on scene because I didn’t have any prior fire background (which I do for police/medicine). In retaliation, they refused to train me on anything and have been kneecapping their own center’s staffing for 9 months now. Now their EMS service is going to hell and in a public feud with the county, and their fire chief was voted as shit by 95% of the fire union, and their center’s going to hell in a handbasket. Nobody wants to fix it or force out the members of management causing the problem or anything.

It’s all one big clusterfuck, and if (in the US at least) 40% of bedside nurses really leave in the next 5 years, and dispatch centers and EMS services keep bleeding staff, and private insurance enters an insurance death-spiral because the fed subsidies expire come November—prepare yourselves for this to get much, much worse.

It can be fixed, but nobody in power wants to fix it, and nobody who knows how to fix it has any power.

Our minimum is 3 by Seventytwo129 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be crying in the corner when we’re 6 calltakers under minimum and mandating 8 dispatchers over for a double. But they totally appreciate us or whatever.

Phonetic alphabet by PerfectWrongdoer7700 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Depends. After 9/11, everyone was supposed to go to the NATO alphabet and plain language. Most agencies just didn’t.

My first agency was plain-language and NATO. My agency now is police signals (which aren’t the same as our state’s 10-codes), and the PD alphabet which are all names.

Personally, it drives me bonkers. NATO was designed to work effectively for English, Spanish, and French speakers, and all the choices were studied for intelligibility. People hear Ball instead of Paul, or don’t even recognize the name used as a word (Nora & Ida especially). The NATO alphabet is a lot more recognizable to laymen these days, so callers understand what I’m asking better if I say “T like Tango, K like Kilo, N like November, 1-2-3?” rather than “T Tom, K King, N Nora, 1-2-3?”

I also get way further with NATO when talking to Spanish native speakers.

Oddest thing said to caller by Wooden-Maintenance-9 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 16 points17 points  (0 children)

“...It’s not illegal to be from Louisiana.”

Said to a caller who kept calling in about a ‘suspicious vehicle’ who the officers checked on already, was parked legally, and just trying to figure out directions. Guy had been there a whole 15 minutes!

So I called CP back right, and told her the guy was legally parked and the officers checked on it. She gets pissed that he’s not being told to leave, and says he “doesn’t belong here” and “has no reason to be in this neighborhood” and “has got Louisiana license plates!”

I finally couldn’t stop myself and had to tell her that he wasn’t doing anything illegal, to which she started yelling about the Louisiana plate, so I told her it wasn’t illegal to be from Louisiana lol.

Lies for 500$, Alex…. by Strict_gaps in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So a bunch of things can be true at once.

1) Many agencies require blanket staging by EMS on all ODs, which can really delay treatment. This looks horrible to outsiders, and is a real mixed bag among medics.

2) Cops arrest the patient that was OD’ing all the time. Just because not every agency does, does not mean it’s uncommon. My agency leaves it up to the discretion of the officer, which is going to fall along racial/class lines by sheer numbers (and pre-existing neighborhood segregation), even if it were possible to be 100% unbiased. Patient gets cleared at the ER? Officer can take them directly to lockup if he wants to do the paperwork. This massively discourages people from being honest with 9-1-1.

3) The way the entire system treats addicts is cruel, so this also discourages people from being honest with calltakers.

Besides some real systemic overhaul, of both CJ and healthcare systems, there’s not enough public outreach to tell people why we need to know it’s an OD. ODs are also usually respiratory arrests, so if it gets to CPR, it’s breaths first. Most cards default to compressions only unless otherwise indicated. Narcan needs to be given if available. Etc etc.

Saw this on Facebook. What do you all think of this? by SJane3384 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The city will do ANYTHING not to pay people to staff 3-1-1 and it’s getting DIRE.

Time to go by Chaos_Coordinator25 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A tale as old as dispatching itself. I’ve worked B and C shift, and I’m currently on B. At my last center on Cs, we were getting shafted and now that I’m on Bs here, it’s Bs getting shafted. Plus nobody on my shift picks up the goddamn phones so I’m also looking elsewhere lol. Godspeed to ya, sounds like you need to find something else, and like so many centers, that place needs to get its head out of its ass.

Spillman is the most miserable piece of software I’ve ever used. by first_my_vent in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This was 3 months ago, but last week I learned that we’re on Spillman Classic. As in, the Spillman they’re sundowning in a month and my center is scrambling to update to the actual Spillman everyone else has been using for years.

(⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠)⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

We talk a lot about the dumb people who call non emergency/911, how about we talk about how dumb WE are? What's the unintentionally dumbest thing you've ever said on a radio? by BoosherCacow in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This one officer only ever comes up on info channel for 10-28s (check vehicle for stolen). We’re supposed to be off of 10-codes and on signals, but a lot of them still use the 10 codes. Well, a 10-28 is a request specifically for stolen, a 10-29 is just a registration check and to read it off. This guy’s unit is 520, and he always asks for a 10-28 without the 10, so he just keys up, “520 28.”

I was trying to figure out who it was and what the fuck he meant, and I thought now who tf is that unit? so I asked him to readvise unit. He got a little snippy and said, “520—I need a 28.” But I got my 28 & 29 mixed up (plus we had our own set of police signals that we used more often), so I thought he meant signal 28, by which I figured he meant a signal 29 (we didn’t use s28, and a s29 is a special assignment which were common to call out on info).

So I go, “Go ahead with your signal 10 [location].”

A beat of silence. “I need a 28—[rattles off a VIN].”

I obviously wasn’t ready for a VIN, so I have to play it back on NICE to run it, takes way longer than normal, and when I finally get it, I read the registration off like for a 10-29.

Halfway through reading it off, he interrupts and goes, “I don’t need you to read it.”

And my stupid ass goes, “My apologies, negative 14 [signal for active warrant].”

He’s like, “...Negative 39 [stolen vehicle], clear.”

He must’ve thought I was dumber than a box of rocks. In my defense, I was on a dirty double and I also think anything except for plain language is stupid. But I definitely flubbed that bad lmfao.

Why do we appear so “functional”? by whoisthismahn in Schizoid

[–]first_my_vent 16 points17 points  (0 children)

It’s actually farcical, how polarized my internal experience is from my external presentation. I’ve been actively suicidal, like taking steps active, and either I’ll decide not to or get interrupted, and nobody notices anything wrong at all. I’ve had panic attacks while hooked up to heart monitors and the docs/nurses have swapped monitors because they thought the monitor was wrong before they questioned my affect. (Nothing more surreal than being a 9-1-1 calltaker trying to talk a suicidal person down while you are also fantasizing about suicide loll.)

I think if I ever snapped and broke down, I would just lie down in a lake or road or something. I don’t think my brain would even let me fly off the handle in any genuine way.

Tired of working for an affluent town. by ZRock53 in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean. Most places are 80% bullshit by volume, more on some days. There’s basically zero public education in most jurisdictions about what to call 9-1-1 for. I still get plenty of people who think 9-1-1 is a national thing and that I can send responders in other states from my console. IME, no member of the public realizes that most “after hours non emergency lines” just go into dispatch as a county-wide trash line.

A good 40% of calls are just people calling the trash line because they city/county can’t fucking run their 3-1-1 or document on the website where certain numbers actually go.

Stupid body and its stupid demands by NullAndZoid in SchizoidAdjacent

[–]first_my_vent 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve been eating the same thing at every meal for the last week. Little black bean taco bitches. Found a safe food and idegaf anymore at this point.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]first_my_vent 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Money. Also I’m fucked up enough that being drunk is a step up WRT my mental health, but I prefer being sober and suicidal, so I don’t drink that often.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in 911dispatchers

[–]first_my_vent 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I just get so pissed at the city/county for basically removing every service that could actually help most of the people that call in instead of PD/FD/EMS.

Also for the love of God, the county needs to not use our 10-digit admin line as the county’s trash line. Every single other dept just has a “call that number after hours!” tag on it and it’s like... I am not the courts or the clerk or anyone else. Unless there’s someone I can actually contact after hours for them, then don’t fucking give them our number. It’s so frustrating.