• dingus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Thank you for your reply. Yeah, I’ve often heard that 911 dispatchers are often put by the wayside and not compensated and taken care of how they should be. And so I’ll occasionally stumble into recordings of calls where the operator was clearly not trained properly or burnt out, which has an effect on their quality of response. It sucks because you guys play a vital role and we all appreciate what you do. I hope you give yourself time to unwind now and then and I hope that your field becomes more recognized in the same vein as being a first reponder. Wishing you all the best.

    • Fondots@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, there’s a lot of areas I really wouldn’t want to have an emergency in because of their 911 centers, if I talked to callers the way some dispatchers in other areas do or was as sloppy with my work I’d probably be fired on the spot. I’d feel like I’m in pretty good hands no matter who answers the phone here, but some places are downright terrifying to deal with.

      It’s not an excuse, but some of it isn’t entirely the dispatchers’ faults, basically every dispatch center in the country is always short staffed (mine included, though we’re not too bad) but some are really desperate for staffing so you run into the choice of either rushing people through training or just not having people to to answer the phone when it rings (I over waited on the line with someone for over 20 minutes waiting for the call to be answered while I transferred them to another agency because they were calling for someone in that area, that’s an extreme case of course, but.) Not really surprising that some places suck when you have a bunch of overworked, underpaid, half-trained people trying to handle emergencies.