How many hours a day do you actually work?
How many hours a day do you actually work?
I should actually be working 8h a day, but most of it is spend not working. If I'm honest I'm probably working more like 3h a day even though I enjoy my job.
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I work 12 hour shifts doing 911 calltaking overnight. Call volume fluctuates wildly, as do the length of my calls. I've had nights where our supervisors get nervous that the phones aren't ringing and start doing test calls to make sure everything is working right, and I've had nights where the phone never seems to stop. On average I probably handle in the ballpark of 100 calls a night to make it a nice round number.
In a perfect world, I could handle each of those calls in probably about 2 minutes or less if every caller is calm and cooperative, prepared to answer all of my questions, and the situation isn't actively evolving while I'm on the phone, but that's not always the case, I've had some extreme outliers I've been on with for over an hour, I have some that are less than a minute, and everything in between, so with no real data to back it up I'm going to say it averages to about 5 minutes a call to keep the math easy.
So about 500 minutes of actually being on the phone, or 8⅓ hours.
That actually sounds a bit high to me, I probably went a little high on both of my guestimates, but that's probably pretty close when I figure in the other little stuff I have to do besides actually taking calls, re-listening to calls, adding additional notes once the call has ended, email, going over my QA reviews, training stuff, etc.
But except for the outliers when we get really busy, that's mostly broken up pretty well. I usually get at least a couple minutes between calls, I get a few minutes to mess around on my cell phone, do some reading, and when things die down later at night I can even bust out my switch and game a little between calls. My agency doesn't really care what we do between calls as long as we're not being disruptive and can put it down when the phone rings.
It actually helped me from learning the 5 Ws in kindergarten.
Where? What? How many ("Wie viele" in German)? What? Wait.
I don't have to make a call often, but all the more important is that I have that in the back of my head. I go through the first four points and then I shut up to for further questions, instructions or just a "okay, got that, sending someone".
I think that is something that everybody should learn early everywhere. Everyone can only benefit from people making short, focused emergency calls.
I really like "wait" being part of that. A whole lot of callers will just go on forever if you let them, they talk in circles, try to tell you their entire life story, repeat themselves, and ramble on about a bunch of irrelevant stuff that I'm not going to do anything with and isn't going into my notes. There's exceptions of course, but very often I'm boiling everything down to about 5 or less short bullet-point-like notes, not even full sentences. We're not taking a report, that's the cops' job, we're just telling them where to go, a brief description of what's going on, and any important hazards or strange situations that are going on they need to be on the lookout for.
Is there an AMA community on Lemmy yet?
I'd be super keen to hear your stories.
I don't really have any interest in doing an AMA to be honest.
A lot of the questions would probably end up being variations of "what's the craziest/funniest/saddest/etc call you've taken?" Which I don't want to get into too much, it's a bit of a pain in the ass going over my stories to make sure I'm not giving away any identifiable info about the people involved, and some of the bigger calls I've had have made the news so I could end up partially doxxing myself. On top of that, a lot of my stories don't have much of an ending. Once the call is over that's usually it for me, I don't really get any follow-up most of the time.
Then there's the "should I call 911 if..." questions. Every agency handles things differently, but overall a lot of places are kind of moving towards handling everything through the same dispatch center, emergency or non-emergency alike, so one way or another it's probably going to come through us, so just call 911 and cut out the middle man. If you need a cop to do something, even if it's call you on the phone, call 911. Worst case scenario we'll tell you to call the station directly, and maybe even give you the phone number, you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even dreams of getting you in trouble for misusing 911. If you have an administrative question like "is my copy of the report ready to be picked up?" "I need to make an appointment to get fingerprinted for my job" "I want to drop off a bunch of cookies for the cops" then yeah, call the station's non emergency number.
"What if I butt-dial 911" just stay on the line, say "sorry, I accidentally dialed you, there's no emergency."
"How do you deal with burn-out?" I just kind of do. There's a lot of different philosophies on this, but personally I think if you have to spend time actually thinking about how to deal with it, you're already on the losing side of the battle. I have family, friends, etc. who I can talk to, hobbies, a life outside of work, etc. It's not something I really worry about, my brain is pretty well wired to deal with the stress without having to really think about how I'm doing it.
"ACAB," yes. If I could do the same job for just fire/EMS, and/or replace most of my police calls with therapists, counselors, crisis intervention specialists, etc. I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat, but I gotta work with the tools I got.
"I called 911 once, and they ..." I really can't speak for your local dispatch center, certainly not your local police, etc. I can tell you how I would have handled a situation and how things probably would have played out here, but that may not mean shit for your situation. Some dispatch centers are trash, if you're living in an area that's covered by one I'm sorry. We're also stuck with a lot of rules and regulations, bureaucracy, etc. so how/why we do some things may not make total sense to people on the outside but by and large there's a reason for most of it, you gotta try to work with the system, fighting it isn't going to get you anywhere.
"I just want to say thank you for doing what you do" I appreciate it, but not really a question
I happy to answer other questions as they come up, but an AMA would probably end up just mostly rehashing those same things in different forms.