Just when you thought I was gone...

OK, OK! I'm sorry. I know... I haven't been around in FOREVER, but I've been really busy and haven't had much to say.

The last few weeks have been quiet with our resident nut... at least while I've been working.

It's been the usual BS stuff that goes on working midnight shift.

We had the fireworks on Wednesday night. It sucked. Lasted 14 minutes, as timed by the Deputy Chief. Then my girlfriend and I went to the firehouse to hang out and shoot the shit with everybody.

Last night was annoying. A few noise complaints and fireworks complaints. Handful of traffic stops. 1 arrest of a drunk Mexican. 4 EMS calls. 1 fire call. Again, the usual BS.

On another note... our dispatch room sucks. The chairs are standard office chairs. We have a pretty bad CAD system (although it's new and was a LOT of money). The radio system kinda sucks. We have NO Internet access besides the 1 state system. I found a copy of 9-1-1 Magazine from a few months ago and I'm just looking at all of the ads for dispatch furniture and electronics...drooling. They keep complaining the town doesn't have enough money. We'll never get anything good. Dispatchers are one of the least recognized people anywhere. How many times has something BIG happened and they never think of the dispatchers? Not that I'm looking for any recognition or anything... I actually hate being in the spotlight. But it's just annoying when everybody on scene of some event takes all of the credit. Hey buddy, don't forget who took the call and sent you there! Where would this world be without dispatchers?

Anyway... without getting too far off topic. I decided to try to get some dispatch resources together to make my life somewhat easier at work. 3 of the 5 dispatchers (myself included there) have found a little trick to get the Internet... and the higher-ups don't know about it...yet. It's our little work-around for when we need weather or tide information or to look up the coordinates for a 911 call from a cell phone.

My new idea was to create a website that includes all of the information we need either right there or by links that go directly there without clicking around too much. I already have a web hosting service with 2 domain names included... I'm only using 1 domain name at the moment... and I've had it for about 6 months. Sucks that I've been paying for 2, I guess. I'll let you all know how that one turns out.

It would be SO much easier if I had a laptop that I could actually bring to work with me so I can work on this stuff. My current laptop has basically turned into a desktop. I broke the screen on it a few months ago, so it's sitting on my desk, closed, with an LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse connected to it. TigerDirect has a decent 0ff-lease IBM for about $499.

I've been doing one other thing to make my life at work a bit easier. I created a bunch of templates in Word for stuff I use often... fax cover sheets, memo templates, prisoner confinement records. I even made a new phone list, organized it nicely, and saved it to my folder on our network so I can update it when something changes. That's going over really well. I've told some of the cops who work the desk and it's making their lives easier, too.

That's about it for now. I'll be back when I have more. I'm going to go register a domain name... once I think of one.

Dispatcher 6