I agree!! I also hate those "kids" that think 911 is a good way to either play a joke or get even with their parents on! Yesterday had a call from a father who was on his cell phone with his daughter who said her bodyguard (yes, bodyguard) was holding her at gunpoint in her car on the freeway. We had deputies from both the area stations driving up and down where she said she was with no luck. She kept disconnecting with dad then calling him back. Then she said the bodyguard let her out of the vehicle but he was still sitting in it and still there. Turned out to be a big joke to her! Our deputies taking care of this priority one call that turned out to be a hoax on Christmas Eve when they could've been tending to REAL emergencies!!

leave it to Josh, one of my co-workers to make me laugh when I feel like crying. he just got a new cell phone (which are not allowed on deck, but I don't care, he isn't using it at all) and he downloaded some new rigtones, so he plays "Grandma got run over by a reindeer" kind of a sick joke, but still it made me laugh! I work with some good guys!! (some jerks too, but let's concentrate on the good guys) brianna

They leave the news on closed captioning 24/7 where I work but only because of national security issues. When 9/11 happened we were trying to pull in local news on rabbit ears in order to hear what was going on. Generally we don't venture far away from that but on the weekends sometimes the guys will turn it on sports. We rarely ever turn the volume up though - too much going on for that either day or night. We will if there is a news story related to our department or something important though. And then, like I said, on holidays when it is really dead they will let us watch a Christmas movie or something. Now there was ONE time a few years ago where it was really really dead on night shift and the supervisor on shift let us watch a Carol Burnett marathon on TV Land. That was kind of fun, but more of something we knew we couldn't usually get away with. I have to say I kind of think while it was fun, at least for our center it would be too much background noise and possibly too distracting for some that I think it's probably best not to have the volume up. You never know when the s*** will hit the fan, and sometimes you just can't react quickly enough to get the volume down before it interferes. Dina

We generally don'****ch anything but news with closed captioning on our set at work (which they only allowed us after 9/11), but on the holidays sometimes they will let us watch a movie quietly. It's either on Fox news (ugh....so sick of Fox news) or sports when one of the guys commandeers the controls. I should grab that remote and switch it to HGTV one of these days! Dina

out of the 17 dispatchers we have, 2 of us are female.. I am stuck on nights, the other one is lucky and is on days... on the overnight shift we can watch TV, and the shift leader "controls" the tv 2 days a week that is me (alt shift leader) I am usually nice and say you guys can watch whatever, since I dont' really care, but there are times, like tonight when I am stuck watching something I really don't like.. ie, the John Wayne marathon on AMC and on Christmas yet.. shooting and bombing, not exactly the Christmas spirit, ya know....... oh well, that is what I guess for being too nice! My gift to the guys, shoot um ups haha brianna