The Bayer Family Blog: Love my job

I love my job. I really do.

I'm a shift supervisor at a Public Safety Answering Point - We answer 9-1-1 and dispatch law enforcement and fire services, among a gazillion other responsibilities.

But sometimes being a supervisor has it's down-side.

Like dealing with complaints about something my dispatchers did, or didn't do.

I've had two complaints come across my desk in the past week. *

And I procrastinate on dealing with them. I don't want to listen to the tapes of the calls and find out one of my crew messed up. To me, they are infallible.

Well, that's not true. I hear them mess up or make little harmless mistakes almost everyday - and sometimes I try to point them out to them. But if someone else - the public or one of our user agencies - complains about my crew, I instantly go on the defensive and try to vindicate them.

I'm almost finished dealing with the first complaint. I spoke to the dispatcher in question and reviewed the call. My dispatcher did everything right - yay!

Now I have call the person back who made the complaint and try to explain that.

I just got the second complaint today - haven't given it much consideration yet, but I spoke to one of the dispatchers involved and glanced at the event cards that our Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system makes for each run. It looks like the two dispatchers involved might have been in the wrong on this one.

Tomorrow is my Friday this week (my last day of work this rotation), then I'm on a three-day weekend to celebrate my oldest daughter's eighth birthday and my 11th anniversary to my wife.

Maybe when I come back next week, I'll be ready to deal with the complaints.

Not related to the complaints, one of my other tasks at work is designing a new Intranet for my department - actually, I'm mostly just advising on the project doing some tweaking here and there to it; another supervisor is handling the actual design (he's better at it than I am, but I've been pushing for the project for a few years, so I get to help). This project is interesting, fun, challenging, and useful.

Not at all like dealing with complaints.

* (I don't really have a desk - complaints show up in my mail tray, which is on top of a community file cabinet in the computer server room. Instead of a desk, I have a "console" that has 4 computer monitors, 2 keyboards, 3 mice, and a bunch of other techie-radio/telephone thingies - looks kind of like a station on the bridge of Kirk's Enterprise).