ne plus ultra

A little one…In Thunderhead, South Dakota…

Work tonight sucks ass. I’m cranky. No ones radios work. I can’t hear anything anyone is saying, and to make it worse they’re whispering into the radios. There are almost a dozen officers out in an area, and we, dispatch, don’t have a fucking clue of where…”we’re out at location one”, “we’re moving to the other residence now”…”what address?”…”oh I’m not sure, maybe about blah, blah, blah…just in that area”. You’re standing in front of a house with numbers on it, read them to me. You’re joining a pursuit everyone else is doing on channel one? Instead of making me try to relay traffic from channel one that I’m supposed to be listening to while you keep chatting on channel two (when my primary is channel two), why not flip over to the other channel? Or scan. It’s amazing how much easier it is to hear something when you’re not talking.
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Me: “respond to 6th and hughitt ..blah, blah, blah”
Them: “can you repeat that address on hughitt?”
Me: “the intersection of 6th and hughitt”
Them: “oh, NOT 6th and hughitt, the intersection of 6th and Hughitt”
~said like I’m the idiot
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Officer runs a vin.
Vin comes back not on file.
The officer knows he ran it right, so he has me run it through another program.
Turns out the officer only gave me 16 digits (vins have 17). I double check the tapes (all radios and phones are recorded) then let said officer know.
Officer: “okay, let me give that to you again then-” He then proceedes to read the vin again slowly and like he was talking to a small child. Or a stupid dispatcher.
Now for the good part - “Yeah, that’s still only 16 digits”.
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Maybe I’m just out of patience since I’ve spent almost 70 hours here in the past 5 days, I’ve had enough. It doesn’t help that we’re short-staffed 3 people (in an agency of 11), and we’ve lost three trainees in the past three weeks (one didn’t make it through training, two quit).

Southern Discomfort is the name of the route (in the Rock Maze, SD).

From the Duluth News Tribune.

Superior firefighters were called to an apartment building fire at 1116 Hughitt Ave. at 2:54 a.m. Monday.

James Leo Olson, 50, faces charges of arson of property other than a building and disorderly conduct. He appeared in Douglas County Court for an initial appearance Tuesday.

According to police reports, Olson started a mattress on fire while his girlfriend of three years, Lynn Anne Bergson, was sleeping. The two had been drinking before the incident and got into an argument when she wanted to go to bed and he wanted to stay up, according to reports and the criminal complaint. She fell asleep and woke to hear Olson saying he had ignited the end of the bed, police say.

I’m going to be in South Dakota making a pathetic attempt at rock climbing for about a week. Posting will resume then…