it's gone a bit banzai
the shit's hit the fan
it's all gone tits-up
and my personal favourite:
the wheels have all fallen off
These can all be used in different tenses and contexts, of course, like:
"Sorry but there will only be two of you on the desk tonight."
"No problem, we'll be fine unless all the wheels fall off."
I've also settled on a few definitions of busy-ness in a Control Room.
There's the kind where the public are busy calling us, new jobs are piling in all the time, and we have to read the new incoming call logs, understand them and prioritise them in our heads. This is like an English exam set by a teacher with a cruel sense of humour and a real ability to deal out punishment. Suddenly seeing four new jobs appear at the same time, with the little counter next to them telling us how fast we need to work in order to meet targets, delivers a big rush of adrenaline - not the most useful thing, when you need to calmly read four logs, risk-assess them, figure out what units you have available and prioritise accordingly, with the radio babbling in your ear all the while. The punishment? That nasty tickling at the back of your neck, all the time there are unread jobs on the queue, that horrible feeling that there's a nasty surprise in there - that the calltaker has accidentally mis-clicked (it doesn't happen often, but it's easily done, especially when you're in a hurry) and sent us a suicide-in-progress as a low-priority "grade three."
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There's the really satisfying kind of busy, when a really juicy job comes in with loads of useful information on it, and you're off the air and have the time to dig deep into our various computer systems and come up with some leads before a police officer has even seen it. It has been known for despatchers to lead arrests in this way - digging deep into our intel and recording systems and finding out where offenders are likely to be. A colleague of mine was credited with getting someone on Attempt Murder not long ago in this way.
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- Bravo Sierra Three One, Bravo Sierra Control
- Bravo Sierra Three One receiving, go ahead
- Three One, I've got a grade two intruder alarm for you, 11 Acacia Avenue, Quietsville, received?
- Three One, that's received, I'm towards.
- Thank you, Bravo Sierra Control Out
"Out" is the signal that I've finished - there should follow a respectful pause and then another unit may transmit if they so wish.
What actually happens during a busy hour on the air (or a really shit hour, as I tend to call them) is a load of fragmented conversations, like the one above but interspersed with units interrupting each other, desperately trying to butt in with their own updates, and tell-tales scrolling up one side of the screen telling me that people are trying to transmit but are unable to get in. There's a domino effect: when the air's busy enough to overload the one poor human operator who's running it, it's also too busy for our radio system and there are a lot of police officers out there pressing their transmit buttons and getting a disappointing "busy" beep back. When they do get through, they're frustrated and annoyed because they've had to wait so the tension goes up another notch.
Hours like that are characterised by lots of fragmented events: lots of jobs going out all at once, lots of officers calling for an ambulance, lots of officers stopping vehicles, then just when you think it can't get any worse, CCTV calls up with a big fight on Shitsville High Street... and then the calm voice of the Custody Sergeant cuts across it all with a laconic, "Do you have a double-crewed unit available? Only I need to transfer a prisoner to hospital." At that point, your brain explodes and kind people lead you away to a nice cup of tea while your colleague takes over. Actually, that's a complete lie - you swear very loudly, then press the transmit button, say, "Received, will do," and get on with it.
A Really Shit Hour is characterised by the feeling that you've just spent an hour bareback riding on the really big horse in that Western film, just about hanging onto its mane by your fingertips, all the while knowing that incoming jobs are piling up unread and trusting to your colleagues to yell if there's something that you really need to pay attention to.
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There's the Really Big Incident. Mostly, we can predict demand - we know that we need more officers and more operators at 2300 on a Friday than 0400 on a Wednesday, for example. But the really big, bad bastard of a job can turn up at any time. It sits there behind you while you've got your feet up on the desk reading the paper on a mid-week night shift while all the good folks are asleep, waiting to catch you with your pants down and bite you in the arse. It's the armed siege, the fire in a block of flats, the unexploded WWII bomb, the dog-walker who's come across a badly burned body. There was a moment when a despatcher saw the Cumbria shootings come in, thought, "what's this then?", clicked on it and thought, ooooooooooh fuck. Then shortly after that, lots of people in the Control Room started shouting very loudly.
Last Really Big Incident I was involved in, there were only two of us on the desk for that area. My mate was on the radio and I was on the phone when the Inspector came over and said to him, "I want a new channel opened up for this incident and I want you running it because you're up to speed with the job." He said, "Yes Ma'am" and did so - neither of them realising that I was on the phone (not easy to tell when we all wear headsets!). I can't even remember who I was talking to - I just hung up and took over the normal Bravo Sierra Control channel while my mate went off to Bravo Sierra Major Incidents with everyone who was on the Really Big Incident.
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There's my own personal hell, my least favourite kind of non-busy. You see, there are times - a lot of times - when we don't actually have any response capacity. Shift change. Briefings that run on and on because the SMT have decided to talk to the troops. Times when we have simply run out of troops and have nothing left to give.
At these times, the radio goes quiet but the jobs keep coming in. You read them and digest them, impotently doing all the intel checks in full knowledge that no-one's going for hours yet, knowing that somewhere there's a frightened person waiting for a uniform to turn up and fix it, all the while digging your fingernails into the desk, in fear of a really serious job coming in while you know you've got no-one to send...
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...then there's the kind that all Control Room Inspectors dread, where there are two incidents that require their attention running (two separate firearms incidents, for example) and they start to get a feel for how we despatchers operate all the time.
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