Politics today.

Man, I WANT a Taco Truck on every corner. That’s like a dream.

I WANT a Chicken in every Pot.

I WANT some Pot in every Chicken.

I WANT Chicken Pot Tacos.

And I WANT them subsidized. I know how to run for president now. I’d win 99% of the voters. Who’s with me?

-glurk

Super random, but…WOW!!

http://sanfranciscopolice.org/day-life-911-dispatcher

But hey…starts at almost $40/hour! http://www.jobaps.com/SF/specs/classspe … =undefined

A Day In The Life of A 911 Dispatcher

San Francisco Police Officer’s Assoc. JOURNAL
Vol 36, number 2
SFPD’s silent partners
By Laura O’ReiIly-Jackson
Emergency Communications Department

Grab your headset, summon lots of patience, and get ready for a work shift full of interesting situations and tons of stress. A police/public safety dispatcher in San Francisco is all about being the vital lifeline to emergency services for help and the SFPD’s silent partners.
Dispatchers in San Francisco receive between 3,500-4,000 calls per day. Ninety percent of the calls are for Police. The other 10% are for Fire/Medical services. Approximately half of all calls are 911 calls, and the other half are non-emergency police calls. Many of the 911 calls in San Francisco are wrong numbers, misdial, or just are not emergency. It has been over a year since dispatchers have begun taking and processing Medical and Fire calls. After screening those calls, they are forwarded for now to real firefighters and paramedics who are still dispatching the ambulances and fire trucks and equipment. Eventually they will be back on the street doing their job and Public Safety Dispatchers will be doing it all, taking, processing and dispatching Police Medical and Fire calls.
There has been no additional compensation or pay raises since we have taken on additional responsibilities. Dispatchers have been trained and given these added responsibilities at a time of extreme economic hardship for every city in the state and especially emergency services. Like many other city employees, we have not had a raise in a year and a half, and are now paying for our own retirement.
Dispatchers are currently classified by the City at a clerical benchmark although we are, in fact, emergency workers who triage police, medical and fire calls as well as dispatch police assignments and provide life-saving post dispatch instructions on medical calls. We are currently formulating a plan to bring to the City regarding a change in classification.
It takes over seven months of training to become a dispatcher. If a class starts out with twenty students, we might get ten full-fledged dispatchers from it if we are lucky. It takes a certain kind of person who is very detail oriented (everything that is typed into calls and runs are court documents) and someone who is very courteous and calm during emergencies. A candidate must have the ability to multi-task (we call it "multifunctional dexterity"). An example on telephone call taking would be handling a 217 (Shooting) or a major 519 (Injury Accident) or an 801 (Suicidal Attempt). A dispatcher must process these calls rapidly and get pertinent information sent up to the channel dispatch. While interrogating a caller with police questions, these type of incidents also require a 408 (Ambulance) to respond immediately. Nowadays, a dispatcher has to change gears after obtaining the most pertinent police information, clear their entry screen and start over to send a separate call up to the Medical Fire dispatchers. We used to transfer the Medical Fire calls to their dispatch for processing; we are now doing it all.
On a very busy radio channel, especially PIC service channels, a dispatcher can have anywhere from fifty to one hundred officers on that channel. Our job is to service all of them when needed. That can be a bit much when there is only one dispatcher and several units asking for different requests at the same time. "Dispatch, I need an ambulance out at … I have .
"Headquarters, I need a case number."
"Dispatch, can you run two subjects for me?"
"I need a callback to this premise, Headquarters, I can’t get into the building." "Dispatch, code four this "
All of these transmissions are coming over the air one after another while the dispatcher is on the phone calling the paramedics to get the ambulance rolling for the initial request. When you are on the telephone making a callback for a unit, or getting an ambulance or the fire unit to respond, you also have to be able to answer your units on the air, (radio and officer safety is first priority). A dispatcher must be able to type information and key your microphone all at once. Picture this multi-tasking situation, it happens every hour of every single day.
San Francisco was one of the premiere cities in California to receive 911 wireless cell phone calls directly. Currently in San Francisco, approximately six thousand cell calls to 911 are routed directly to ECD (Emergency Communications Department). Previously all such calls went directly to CHP (California Highway Patrol), then were transferred to the appropriate city and agency. CHP is dealing with a lot less emergency calls in San Francisco now since those calls are directly coming to us.
With this comes 911 information. Whereas when CHP used to transfer calls to us from a cell phone and no one was speaking on the line, that was it, you could just hang up. Now we receive information that shows a general cellular site from where the caller is located. The caller usually is in a one-mile radius of that cell site. We also retrieve their complete cell phone number including various area codes and their cellular company name. When an open line comes in now on 911 from a wireless cell phone, and no one speaks directly to us, we have to hang up, call back the phone number, speak with the caller, or leave a message on a voicemail. Then, we log the call in CAD. That is a lot more work for us. It is better service for the public and it equates to approximately 150-200 more calls a day for us to process.
ECD is involved in a lot of community outreach. We participate in various job fairs in the Bay Area and public events in San Francisco. We also attend police station community meetings where we teach the public about the proper use of 911. We instruct on when to call 911 and what information will be needed from the caller.
This encompasses most of what we do as San Francisco Police/Public Safety Dispatchers. In our hearts, we know that we have helped many people during some of the worst or most stressful times of their lives. We are the voice and ear on the other end of the phone. We are proud to assist SFPD’s finest when they are out on the street, we are the calming voice in their ears and their helpline on the other end of their microphones.

So, I was in Wal-Mart earlier. And yes, I hate the place, but I overheard this conversation between two young male workers there:

Guy 1 – "Hey, so I found out what that thing was. It’s a shoehorn!"
Guy 2 – "Wow, a shoehorn? What’s that?"
Guy 1 – "Well, when old people had to force their feet into tight shoes, they used it like a wedge."
Guy 1 – continuing – "Have you ever heard of Dutch wooden shoes?"

Anyway, perhaps I am just easily amused, but I sort of laughed at this conversation. That two people have never seen, heard of, or even knew the word "shoehorn." Honestly, I think I am just getting old, LOL!

-glurk

Ha Ha! You’re probably not that old Glurk……. unless you use a shoehorn!

Glurk, I hope that does not make you old….because I still have shoehorns in the house. Lol.

Question everything.

I always enjoy a good laugh…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6Dp-GugW3I

This seriously made me

"OMG they got Joe"

Love the googely eyes!

My wife went to a dinner with two friends. Besides the fact that she obviously ‘forgot’ her wedding ring (I meanwhile figured out she was with a befriended couple), the picture shows something extraordinary:

As you can see, the right (!) hand of the woman sitting on the left side is clearly below the table. So far, so good. The problem: Inside the mirror on the wall you can clearly see her hand, with the same clothes type, high above all their heads. And that is weird.

It is not a photoshopped picture and was made & uploaded yesterday.

That girl either had to put her hand down in a time frame which equals the difference of light speed (for the differential distance between mirrored and the direct way to the camera).

That’d be something around 1/billionth of a second.

Or my wife and her friends are ghosts.

I have never seen something like this before. Also, I still don’t know how this is possible at all. Even a complex angle is no option as the difference of the hand in the mirror and the and near the table is surely at least 2 feet. Moreover, the girl looks relaxed and not as if she had moved shortly before the picture was made.

If you can figure out how that was possible, please let me know..(don’t expect any qualified answer from my side, I have absolutely no idea..)

QT

Only one hand is under the table. So my guess is that her right hand which we see in the mirror must be obscured behind the heads of the dinner guests, due to the angle of the shot.

That’s what I had thought in the beginning, too..HOWEVER: In the mirror..it indeed shows a left hand, thus outside of the mirror it must have been her right one – the one under the table. One can also see in the mirror that it would be the hand on the outer side of the group and not towards my wife..that also defines it as her right hand..one can try that by holding the hand towards a mirror..

Also, if the camera mirrors the picture (which it does not, at least not in the end), it’d be a similar situation. That’s what makes it a bit tricky…

And finally: If the camera closing time was 1/20th of a second, one could see at least a moving hand or something like that, which doesn’t appear either..I’m clueless..

QT

Could it be the photographer’s hand? Or a 5th person’s hand?

Not really…photographer’s thumb can be seen on the top, accidentially. I even know the room/table. To the left is not much space left, nobody seen on the pic either. Instead, in the mirror you can see that there in fact is nobody. Even if somebody was behind those three the hand should be seen..no matter how I turned it, it’s sort of an impossible picture.

The only idea is that the picture, due to some sort of technology, consists of two different pictures made in a short period of time. This again, however, would make the rest of the picture blurry or show different moves of the people, too. Still have no idea..

QT