Not Different Calls, but a Different Me

Calls this morning, minutes after hitting the chair:

first came in as a 911 hang up. That's what we call it when someone dials 911 and hangs up before we answer. what a lot of people don't realize is that the phone company completes that call anyways, and the caller ID information is transmitted to the police department. When the call-taker picks up the phone on their end and says, "911 what's your emergency?" they are greeted by a dial tone.

In most call centers, the standard procedure is to call the number back if one comes through on the ANI/ALI relay. In the event the call came from a house phone (so the caller id includes an address) we will send an officer if we don't get an answer on the call back to the house.

So when I got a dial tone on a call this morning, I "dumped" the info into my call screen and typed, "911 HANGUP...ON CALL BACK...."

Ringing...kept ringing...and kept ringing.... I was about to put the call in with the notes..."NO ANSWER ON CALL BACK."

Then someone picked up. A man.

"this is Russell from the police department. I just received a 911 call from this line what's going on there?

man: Well something's going on here. so you probably did get a call.

"What is going on, sir?

man: I just got a little worked up and went after my wife. Here talk to her.

"Hello?"

The wife gets on the phone.

wife: hello?

"Hi, this is Russell from the police department, what's going on there?"

(By this time, officers were already on the way.)

I won't even get into the rest of it. It's painfully cliche'. He hit her, I don't know how many times, but she didn't want him to get in trouble. She was even telling him to get in the car and leave before we got there.

He was a vet dealing with PTSD, and non-compliant with meds so he sometimes lashed out. I kept telling her that despite her protestations we were coming, officers were on their way and getting even closer.

It didn't make her angry. but she was despairing. The hardest part was hearing the 7 yo in the background absolutely distraught, crying the whole time because she felt she was going to lose her father.

I overheard the father telling her to go to her room, and the mother trying to explain that she was scared and she just wanted to hug him.

The recording was only 4 minutes long, but it felt like one of the longest calls I've ever taken.


Almost right after that, I get a call from a woman who was walking her dog when a tween girl comes running and screaming down the street. She was barefoot, and nearly incoherent. The caller didn't know if she had been attacked or if she was lost or hurt in some kind of accident or what.

The girl was telling the caller, in bits and pieces, that her bed had been moved, that she woke up in her closet, and her mom was missing. She was sobbing in the background. Eventually, we were able to find out that the girl's mother had recently passed. She probably did wake up in the closet in her house, just a few doors down, but she had no recollection of how she got there.

She had a small cut on one foot from running down the street without shoes.

I spent the next hour or so looking at pictures of my daughter on my phone an stored on my computer: wishing I could be home chasing her around our coffee table, turning her upside down and tickling her and laughing.

This job is what I love to do. I'm not bad at it. But it did get a lot harder when I came back to it after becoming a father.