Things Not To Say

There are a few things you never want to say if an officer picks you up for OWI.  It doesn’t do much for your case and often insures that the officer is going to have less mercy on you if there is wiggle room.

One of these things is “Hey, I drank 2 1/2 pitchers of beer by myself and I didn’t feel it at all.  Then I drank more when I drove over to my buddies house – maybe a six pack or more.”  Especially don’t brag about the amount of liquor you drank, how you didn’t feel a thing and could have easily drank more before you drove home.

Secondly, don’t tell the officer that you speed all the time on the interstate because you feel it is safer to do so.  Then, when the officer asks “How so?” don’t go into details of how you get up to 90+ to pass semi’s in a 70mph speed zone or how you like to always be in the lead so sometimes you have to maintain 90 mph for awhile to pass everyone in sight.

Third, you might not want to tell the officer that you don’t understand why he cared if you were speeding.  Telling him that he should have looked the other way and eaten another donut, isn’t going to instill a feeling of camaraderie.

Last but not by any means least, don’t ramble on and on about how you wanted to join the military to shoot at people but they wouldn’t take you for whatever reason.  Something about saying you’d rather be in a foreign country shooting at people seems to make the officer a little uneasy about releasing you back into the wild.  Probably want to leave out any violent urges or fantasies you have too because, generally speaking, officer’s abhor violence.

Course, you could do all these things anyway but I assure you, you’ll end up in the orange jumpsuit in front of a judge who isn’t amused by your freckled, innocent looking baby face.

What are the odds?

What are the odds that my job would purchase a program that quizes dispatchers on how they would handle calls – and that the first lesson, which has three calls, would have the Denise Amber Lee case? The call was the one from the lady who reported a child in a car screaming.  The minute she said “blue camero” and that there was a child screaming – I knew it was my case.

I couldn’t stop myself from crying as I listened to this woman describe the car and the child who ended up being Denise screaming in the backseat.  It was awful.  The dispatcher didn’t put it together that the case was related to the kidnapping.  I often wondered what the caller said during the call but never enough to want to listen to it.  Tonight I had to listen to it because it was part of the quiz – I had to answer questions on what the driver said and things the dispatcher could have done differently.

I have to say, it hit me pretty hard when I realized it was my case.  I had to stop the call, compose myself and then listen to it.  Listening to it was tough and made me think, once again, that I don’t want to do this anymore.  I don’t want the possibility of those kinds of calls – I don’t want the responsibility of trying to help people and then the guilt when I can’t.  I need to find a new line of work.

I also don’t want this call coming back when I’m not prepared for it.  At least if I seek it out, I have had time to prepare myself but when it comes out of nowhere, it hits me hard.  It is salt in a wound that will take a long, long time to heal.

Main Terminal On

My computer tells me the above, that the “main terminal” is “on.”   It isn’t working, it has no saved formats, and basically is doing nothing at all but it is “on” so I guess it thinks that is good enough.

My brain terminal is “on” too but I wouldn’t vouch for it’s efficiency right now.  Everyone is in such a tizzy already and my brain seems to have decided that it isn’t going to participate in the mayhem tonight.  Officers are pissed at guards, guards are pissed at officers, guards are pissed at me, blah, blah, blah.

Instead of the worries this might normally bring to me, my brain is happily daydreaming about nonessential things…one might say my brain has checked into an Utopian Resort where everything is coming up roses.  A lot of people can’t do that – shut off their brain or go to a happy spot.  Often if I’m overly stressed, I can’t either unless I get to a quiet spot to relax myself enough to float off.

So I guess this terminal next to me has floated off to it’s happy spot and, while it is “on” it isn’t really there.  I could reboot to force it to come back but, you know, it’s lack of being in the present really doesn’t bother me at all tonight.