Routine Emergency

County 911, do you need police, fire, or ambulance?

I couldn't begin to imagine the number of times those words have left my mouth. It's our profession's equivalent of, "Would you like fries with that?" We don't even hear the words anymore, but it's not important that we hear them.

We have to hear what comes next, though. The next few seconds of a call can tell you what the tone of the entire incident is going to be. Consciously or unconsciously, a good dispatcher is listening to the non-verbal cues pouring through their headset. Background noise. Tone. Pace. Phrasing.

After a year or two it's easy to become jaded. We've heard most of it, dispatched as much, and found that there is often a significant gap between what we're told and what our responding units find when they arrive. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of complacency, or worse yet, predisposition. "Mrs. Jones has called six times in the past month for chest pain; I'll just keep clicking through my game of Solitaire while I ask the routine questions." Somewhere around "red ten on black jack" you realize that Mrs. Jones has just told you her husband is unresponsive. Suddenly it's time to back up and try to recall what she's been mumbling in your ear for the past minute or two.

I've trained more than a handful of new dispatchers. Among the other little trinkets I try to impress on them is the one thing I always keep in the back of my head:
It's just another call for me, but for the caller, it's the worst day of their life. No call is a routine call for them.

If, somehow, we keep that in mind, our handling of calls will go a whole lot better.

I said it's easy to get complacent. After five or ten years it's no longer complacency, it's cynicism. After that - well, I'll let you know if and when I get there.