I still remember the last year when you guys took me to dinner while I was in town and there was a dispencery next door. When I said I had wanted something with local flavor, I was wondering if you were taking it a bit too literal.
I remember thinking at first, "What's Mike talking about?" We really don't even notice the dispensaries anymore. They're there and you noticed how few customers they had compared to the restaurant next door. I don't think a single person went in or out anytime we were in sight of the storefront. One that's near one of the fast food joints near my office in a strip mall in a not so nice part of town, I'll sit and eat lunch in the car and watch and they're lucky if one person walks in, in an hour long lunch. The pawn shop the same owners own has three or four customers in that part of town in the same timeframe.
If you've ever been a paramedic and had to scrape the bodies up that some drunk hit, you'd know it's more than the "children." I can almost guess I'm going to find an intoxicated driver in most of these accidents. The oddest damn one was a drunk who rear ended a stopped motorcyclist. I come on scene to find the bike welded upright to the front of the car. The biker has yanked the driver out of his car by his hair. I'm trying to keep the two seperated b y bribing the biker to let me check him out in the back of the ambulance until the police get there to haul off the drunk to jail.
This is why I always had to work the other end of the radio. I'd be too tempted to walk back to the bus saying I had to check on something and let him beat the holy hell out of the idiot. Heck, we have supplies to patch him up sitting right there anyway, and if it got really out of hand I'd just call dispatch for another bus. Ha.
Nowadays most departments around here barely let a bus get anywhere near anything without officers on scene. If anyone had said there was a fight with unknown weapons, the dispatcher would slow the bus down if they were going to beat the PD to the scene, for better or for worse.
Obviously it's never that controlled or predictable in the real world, but I've heard busses pulled over and parked by the dispatcher for fairly long periods of time if a fight breaks out at an MVA. Or told to use their own discretion and they do, by waiting around the corner.
Often times the FD arrives in enough numbers to act as muscle for the Medics before PD arrives and that usually works, too.
Kinda glad fate didn't have me stay in that biz.
Never had anyone seriously hurt on the other end of the radio while I was a Sheriff's dispatch intern, but had a couple of scary moments. Getting a call from a nearly panicked Sheriff's deputy in a bad radio coverage area, knowing his backup was nearly thirty minutes out, on snowy mountain roads, wasn't a good feeling in dispatch. He called us on a land line a minute or so later and was ok, but he had us all pretty worried for a minute or two -- and it sure seemed like longer than that.
We had a call from a State Trooper in our area on the mutual aid channel who came within inches of being dead when a driver barely missed him while he was making a traffic stop on the Interstate. He was calling to give us a plate number of the idiot to see if we had anyone who could pop up out of the small town onto the highway and pull the second car over to check sobriety.
Amazingly time, speed, and distance worked out right that night, and a Sheriff's deputy managed to pull over the second car. And they were drunk. They got to enjoy a tour of the Sally port and a free night in the county jailhouse downstairs from dispatch. Trooper came upstairs and had a cup of coffee and thanked us for the help.
