Monday, March 9, 2009

Whistle While You Work...Not Hardly

I got to work this morning and opened my office door about a nanosecond before my boss came in. Over the weekend some of the senior members of our communications division did a horrible job taking and dispatching a call. I mean horrible. For some reason one of them took a call about a serious car accident, entered the call with the personnel as "on scene" and it went without rescue personnel actually being sent.

The problem with this, aside from the poor injured woman waiting 10 minutes until rescue personnel arrived, is that the people involved have been working here for over 15 years. This is not some new person who doesn't know the rules or how to do the job.

My job in this event, of course, is forensic. I am to recreate the situation that occurred in the computer from the call take to the actual dispatch. It's not a big thing, but it is time consuming. The person involved made it a bit more interesting by blaming the computer for part of the problem. Um, sorry, but that's not possible.

Computers do fail, programs do have glitches. But not the dispatch program and not only on one computer. If someone at another workstation in the center had reported computer problems that excuse would have flown better. But no one else had problems and I personally had checked out the server early Saturday morning in anticipation of the time change on Sunday. So I know the server was working properly and with no desperate phone calls to my home or cell to tell me that they had problems, everything had to have been working properly.

Like I said, it's not a big deal to do this work, but it is annoying in a day when I had already planned to work on some more complicated issues.

Ah well - mistakes. They are more or less job security.

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