Back to Graveyards

Graveyards is the one shift where you can truly feel alone in the station. Especially now that our squad room is in the old rescue temp trailer rather than here in the building. In the time I've been a dispatcher, the squad room has moved from literally across the hallway from dispatch, to down the hallway and around the corner, to outside in an entirely different building (well, trailer.) I wonder some times if the moves were not so much about space but about getting further away from the requests of dispatchers. It's not like I can walk down the hallway to the squad, I have to stay here. And when I ring their phone they have the choice to not answer me, unlike when they were across the hall and I could yell at them through my sliding window. But anyway, it means that I am currently the only human being in the main station room.

I'm running on caffeine right now, as you can probably tell. I had a great rest of the weekend involving a trip to the beach with a good book (Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier) which left me with bikini tan lines so stark you can see where the string was tied at the back, another rock-out Guitar Hero sesh with Sean and some general relaxing. I topped it off with another run today, actually two split into one. I ran the 5k route from Five Points to my apartment, collapsed and re-hydrated, only to get a text from Sean suggesting I run to downtown and do the farmer's market with him and he would drive me home. So that was about another 1.9 miles. Not my best miles but the point is to be out there doing it, right?

I was supposed to get a nap in before work, but it didn't end up happening. We got sucked in to season 2 of Breaking Bad instead. That left me worried I would fall asleep here at work, but I've made it 7 hours so far, with 3 to go before I crash. When I did arrive at work, my radio console was apparently on the fritz, which made my day easier as all I had was secondary traffic due to my transmitter not working. About 3 hours in to shift I glanced at my console, which we had had a tech looking at during day shift. I noticed there was an unplugged cord, so I set about finding where it went, plugging it in and re-booting my DOS radio. Sure enough it came up like a charm. I can't believe our tech didn't see it, the darn thing has a label on it from a dot matrix printer. It could not have screamed "I belong to the radio console!" Any louder. But I'll take credit for being the fresh pair of eyes and breathe a big sigh of relief that our Centracom Gold Series has not crapped out yet. My eyes will not be so fresh tomorrow, as I recover from this caffeine fueled 24 hours of consciousness, but such is the life on night shift.