god damn dispatchers.

It is a very warm summer night, a night that is strange for this time of year. Normally this time of year, there is an increase in shootings and stabbings. One thing that I have learned in this profession is that nobody can ever seem to just “get along” with one another. If the weather is nice then people feel the need to go outside. When people go outside they have a few cocktails. When they have a few cocktails they go one of two ways. The first way, is that they consume booze to the point they fall down and someone calls acting as the Good Samaritan. The other way is that they continue to drink, run their mouth, and eventually get assaulted for offending someone. Moral of the story, don’t attend your funeral as a man named Phil Shiffley.

Also as I continue to sit here, I noticed that I have never really spoke about the unsung heroes and the worst and most hated people in any service based industry. We call these terrible individuals the dispatchers. No don’t get me wrong, there are some very very phenomenal telecommunicators here. There are also some not so good dispatchers here. What is the difference you might ask? Great question!

First off the dispatcher is the most despised person for a simple reason. They are the person who tells you were to go and what to do. When you are tired and you want a break, it is the dispatchers fault as to why a call came in. When you want to dodge jobs, and hide, it’s the dispatcher’s fault for seeing what you are doing on their maps and stop you. When you don’t want to pick up a certain regular that you have taken every day for the last 3 weeks, it will be the dispatcher’s fault that you happened to be a block away when the call comes in. No matter what the dispatcher does or says, unless they are cancelling a unit off of an assignment or telling the unit they are clear to return for shift change, you are the bad guy.

Now luckily for me, I am one of the few people here that are cross trained, meaning that I work the street normally, but will be occasionally pull up to dispatched when short staffed, or whenever a crafty plan is devised by supervisors to benefit themselves. (we do what makes them happy). The one thing that I see being a cross trained dispatcher is seeing all of my co-workers react to what the dispatchers say, forgetting that I myself am a dispatcher. Now I know that there is more than a fair share of shit talking about me when I am on the mic. Nobody wants to be working their ass off, nor do we want to make anyone have to break their ass. Sadly, there is still a job to be done.

In my few years of being up here, I can easily say that I am left more drained after a 12 hour dispatcher shift, than I am after working a busy night on the streets. Why? The type of work is completely different. On any given night the dispatcher is responsible for not only screening 911 calls, gathering vitals information, keeping in contact with all the units on the street, dispatching the units, and making sure everyone is safe. All of these things are occurring simultaneously, your eyes are jumping between 5 screens. Your ears are listening to units step on one another while they all attempt to broadcast their message. You are trying to send the closest available unit to an assignment based on what a computer tells you is the closest, yet your street smarts kick in, knowing that there are other units are closer. The phone rings constantly to the point you feel like you are in the movie Casino and your head is being beat in by Billy Sherbert.

After 12 hours of this, you feel like death. You feel like you won’t make it home to your bed. Youre day is shot and you are left with nothing. Now how does all of this tie in together? The difference between a good dispatcher and someone who sits behind a console? The good dispatcher is always a step ahead of the units on the street. They understand the units, they understand the tendencies and they understand how people operate. They know how people are going to sit on scene for 25 minutes after they left the patient. They know who their go to units are, and who they can send on special assignments and things will be handled the proper way. Now as you read this, you may or may not understand of what I speak. And that’s fine. Anyone who has worked a busy system knows exactly what I am saying.

On the other side of the card, there are people who simply read what is on their screen. These are the people that will dispatch the “train accident” in the 3^rd floor apartment. It takes a certain amount of thinking. It is also why it is important that the dispatcher knows the area of which they dispatch. Again, this results in sending a unit to the 30^th floor in an area of 2 story houses. No in some cases the dispatchers catch on to what is happening and they are able to grow and develop. Other dispatchers are similar to stapling jello to the wall, it’s never going to stick.

One thing that is upsetting is the abuse that the dispatchers take for doing their job. They occasionally receive a pat on the back. More often than not, they are being reprimanded for not getting a unit to the scene fast enough, or they are having their heads chewed off by a caller who feels that her toe pain warrants a life threatening response from our units. But night after night the battle wages on. Dispatch does their job the way they are trained and the street units yell and take every assignment personally. It’s the ying and the yang of EMS. If we didn’t have this, the world may implode.