Life in the Hot Seat

Excerpted from Caroline Burau’s Answering 911: Life in the Hot Seat, a new memoir now available at bookstores from Borealis Books, an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Maybe you and I have already spoken, but we didn’t exchange names. Or maybe you told me yours, but mine never came up. You may have yelled at me, or begged me to hurry, or passed out in my ear. You may have told me something really personal. I might remember it, or I might not. I may glance at your house as I drive to the store or to pick up my daughter, but I won’t slow down. I don’t necessarily want to know people’s secrets, I just do.

If I write about you sometime, it’s nothing to get worried about. I’ve forgotten your name, or changed it, and I’m just getting it all out. If you left something with me, maybe I’m just trying to give it back. If I left something with you, I hope it was good. Maybe I was there when you had your worst day ever. Maybe it was my worst day too, until the next one.

One thing’s for sure: If you saw me on the street, you would never know me. You couldn’t thank me, if that’s what you might want. You couldn’t smack me in the face either.

My family worried, when I left the newspaper, that I wasn’t going to be a writer anymore. But the day after Dori Swanson died, I started writing about it. I had to tell someone about her, what she did to herself, and then what she did to me. I kept on writing because I wanted to do something to record all of the other Dori Swansons I was meeting in this new life of mine.

Maybe someday, I’ll get it right. I’ll explain what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a shitty, insane, life-changing call, and I’ll do it justice. I’ll figure out how to make you understand what it’s like to be staring at a crossword puzzle and trying to think of a six-letter word for “run rapidly” one minute, and the next, asking a twelve-year-old girl what kind of a gun her mother just used to blow her own head off. Someday I’ll figure out how to make you feel it, and then maybe I’ll win the Pulitzer Prize; or maybe you’ll hate me for it.

Every day that I sit down at a console in the 911 center, I tell myself that today could be the day. If I don’t, I’ll forget and get lazy. Today could be the day that I take a call that will change me a little bit forever. It could be the day that a bell gets rung that I can never un-ring. Someone could die in my ear today and take a piece of me with him. Someone could tell me something unimaginable, and I’ll have to imagine it.

Still, I can relax. Statistically, it’s probably not going to happen today. What’s likely today is that I’ll watch a little TV and make a lot of small talk with the dispatcher at the console next to me. What’s also likely is that I will become intimately familiar with whatever word game or crossword puzzle has been downloaded to my computer by some other dispatcher, and that even though I’ll play it on and off for the next seven to eight hours, I’ll still suck at it by the end of the shift.