I’ve been a 911 dispatcher for fourteen years. It is a decent-paying career (in most places), you can usually get in with no experience, and there is great job security. But it’s not all grins and giggles. It is a very stressful job, you have to work all kinds of different hours, and hardly ever get rewarded for a job well-done. Here are some of the things that you can expect during the course of a day as a 911 dispatcher:
- Phones – I hope you like to talk on the phone, because most of your day will be spent answering phone calls. And don’t expect nice people, either. I’d say probably 90 percent of the people that you talked to are pissed off at you, and for reasons that you had no control over. Most people are wanting to report that they have been the victim of some sort of crime or having some sort of crisis, and they normally take out their frustrations on you.
- Radios – While it’s fun and exciting to talk on a radio, the attitudes that you get from the other end take the fun away pretty quick. Most of your radio conversations are with police officers that either: A) think they’re God because they wear a badge; B) are dealing with the scum of the earth and take out their frustrations on you; C) just think you’re an idiot; or D) are actually pleasant to talk to. Twenty-five percent (for the nice ones LOL) isn’t a very good percentage, so you end up spending most of your day bickering and arguing with the officers on the other end of the radio.
- Dealing with crisis – It doesn’t matter if it’s coordinating a high-speed pursuit, bank robbery response, foot pursuit, armed subject, or whatever high priority situation comes up… you can bet that at the end of the day, your nerves will be shot. The funny thing is that most smaller agencies don’t have the resources to give you a break, meaning that if a crisis situation happens at the beginning of your 12-hour shift, you’re going to have to sit there until your shift is over.
- Dealing with administration – For some reason, most of the time admin people come into dispatch is when there is absolutely nothing going on. They only see the 90 percent boredom, not the 10 percent of sheer hell. So rather than realize that dispatchers need some of that down time to calm their nerves or whatever waiting for the next emergency, they try to find every little project so they can dump it on dispatch. This has been the same with every agency that I have worked with. It’s not enough for dispatchers to do their own job, which is answering phones and dispatching on the radio, so they feel the need to bombard them with paperwork, too.
That’s what a 911 dispatcher can expect every day of their career. While there are some exceptions to the rule, and I applaud every one of them (LOL), dispatching can be a very stressful job. Dispatchers are, after all, like air traffic controllers for the ground. It can be a very rewarding career, but can also be one of the worst. It depends on how tough you are mentally, how quick you’re able to respond to emergency situations, and how much support that your employer will give you.
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