Life in the Hot Seat

There will be plenty of 911 calls, but most of them won’t be anywhere near as interesting as most people believe.

“You’re a 911 operator? Wow! I bet you’ve got some stories.” I get that at parties a lot.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. Then in the space where you would expect me to start telling one of those wildly interesting stories, I usually draw a blank and start sipping meaningfully on my Diet Coke.

The most interesting stories are also the saddest. And you only think you want to hear them until I tell them to you. Then you start sipping meaningfully on your Diet Coke and you don’t know what to say.

They are the stories where mothers and fathers fail their children. They are the stories where friends and lovers do awful things to hurt each other because of drugs or alcohol, or worse, for no real reason at all. Or they are the fascinating ways that some people lose their grip on reality. Interesting? Yeah, but not amusing. And I don’t always want to tell them to you at a party because I might try to make them amusing just because I think that’s what you want to hear.

One night, surfing the Internet for books about 911 dispatching, I found a single book, meant to be funny, packed with wacky, real-life stories about 911. The lone review warned potential buyers that the book wasn’t funny at all, just depressing.

But death and chaos aren’t the only events that make the 911 phones ring. Most of the calls are actually pretty routine. By routine, I mean that they are routine to us. Maybe not to you, though.

“My husband slipped out of his wheelchair. Can somebody help me lift him?”

“Someone broke into my car.”

“My sixteen-year-old son is smoking pot.”

“My neighbors are shooting off fireworks again.”

“Somebody egged my house!”

Those are the calls we get by the hundreds and thousands. It’s hard to feel anything much for those people, not because they don’t deserve it, but because there are so many. It’s especially hard to listen to the ones who want to act like getting their cell phones stolen out of their cars is the BFD of the century. Listen, if you leave it on the seat in broad daylight with the doors unlocked, then get ready to kiss it goodbye. And don’t expect me to cry a river over it either. Just give me your name, number and location so I can send out the cop, who will be equally apathetic, to take a report. And when the cop doesn’t wail and gnash his or her teeth over your cell phone either, you’ll think we’re all a bunch of insensitive bastards. Think whatever you want, I guess. Just lock your door next time.

The problem is, if I cry over your cell phone, then I won’t have anything left for the calls that need me. The night that Dori Swanson died, I cried. But I waited until the end of the shift.

“911?”

“My mom just killed herself!”

“How did she kill herself?”

“She shot herself. Oh my God.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“It’s in her hand.”

“Is she still alive?”

“I don’t think so. Oh God! No. She’s dead.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twelve.”