An Expensive Lunch

I had lunch with my wife today and we got swept up into the consumerism thing and an hour later we were out $8215 with the promise of a bottle-green Triumph Bonneville with two miles on the clock to be waiting for us at Pure Triumph Ft Lauderdale this weekend.
I am still in shock.
Now I need to get serious about selling the GTS.

Oh The Humanity

At work last week we had a transformation. The Trainee lost some of his humanity, and it all happened on receipt of one 9-1-1 phone call.

We were sitting around in the Communications center, the four of us, talking of this and that. I think I was reading a book, a travel tale about two men crossing the States on a couple of Heinkel scooters, the others were muttering about fashions or celebrity gossip or TV shows, about all of which i know nothing, so I keep my mouth shut. I have a lot of trouble when I'm training someone to answer the police phones, in holding back and letting the trainee struggle a bit, so in order to give my latest Trainee a bit of room I try to absent myself in a book between calls, and I distance my microphone from my mouth, so he gets to start the calls unobstructed by my voice.

A 9-1-1 line started to ring and the rule is when one of the eight red lines starts to blink and whine drop everything and answer it. The Trainee did just that. Anticipating a false alarm I kept reading but through my headset I heard the unmistakable tones of a true emergency. The caller's voice was off pitch and warbling as though he were struggling to keep control as he told The Trainee that there was a dead man in his neighbor's trailer.

I expected The Trainee to go into his usual freeze mode,unable to type, failing to ask the questions and I scrabbled frantically for my clip board so I could write down the details. However he calmly asked the caller to repeat the address, he entered it and started to type: " caller found white male sitting in chair..." And as the details got grosser, and they got pretty bad as death rarely comes clean and tidy, he kept on typing even as he toned the ambulance and gave them their instructions over the radio.

I knew there really was a dead man out there and The Trainee understood it too. We get lots of panicked calls about possible dead people lying on the sidewalks, but they generally turn out to be drunk and passed out in this party town. We know what questions to ask to get our pulses up when dead people really are dead. The Trainee took the call and dealt with it like a real dispatcher.

He was excited afterwards, focusing on his professional response to a crisis, running through his mind how he had dealt with the call. It took a while for him to remember that someone had died. In a weird way I felt good about it. He is building the carapace he needs to answer the phones, not to freeze up and start trembling.

The next day we got three ambulance calls all together and he dispatched therm by himself, putting each unit on the proper call, making notes in the computer and tidying everything up before he swivelled his chair to face the middle of the room and resume his interrupted conversation without even a reference to the bloody scooterist, tripped cyclist, or elderly woman possibly having a stroke. They were all being taken care of quickly and efficiently and he wanted urgently to know what his colleagues thought of his hair cutting plans.

Clearly he won't be The Trainee for much longer and all he can think about is signing up for overtime.

They never did tell us what the dude died of, but we're dispatchers, so we've long since forgotten the call.