Practical Joke in Police Dispatch Center

[morjana]

Many years ago, I worked as a police dispatcher for a fairly large Calif. city in the general San Francisco/N. Ca. area. Due to various circumstances, we had a turnover rate of approximately 80%. When I was hired, I was 79th in the seniority. When I quit six years later, I was sixth in seniority. You do the math.

Because we had such a high turnover rate, we would hire ten trainees at a time, put them through six months of training (and in the meantime, six TRAINED dispatchers would quit), and we usually only retained one of the ten trainees on average.

(For info, when then President Reagan fired the PATCO employees, we hired five ex-PATCO employees as police dispatcher trainees. NONE of them passed probation -- they all said our job was too difficult. And they were former air traffic controllers!)

Anyway, back to the practical joke. This took place in 1980, before personal computers in the workplace, even before we went to a 911 format. [You know why 911 is pronounced as Nine One One? Because there's no eleven button on the telephone. No joke. People, when they panic in an emergency, if they're thinking "Dial Nine Eleven," wouldn't be capable of processing Eleven as two one's. At least, that's what we were told.]

We used a DataSpeed 400 teletype machines to access the various Law Enforcement information portals. This particular machine had a monitor, and if you left it in "receive" mode, the incoming message would not only print on the paper portion of the teletype machine, but also display across the monitor as it was received. One of the features of the system, was that you could format the text to "blink," input a command to have the bell on the teletype machine to ring, and so on.

Also, if you knew the physical phone number for the teletype machine you were calling (vs. the mnemonic identifier), and took YOUR machine off line when you dialed out, you could bypass the system, and call just that machine.

So...we had this new trainee. Young kid, looked like a skinny Adolph Hitler, and thought he was god's gift to women. And he liked hitting on the married dispatchers. One dispatcher, who was married to a cop, actually had to have her husband come in and tell the guy to leave her alone.

He was a jerk and a general pain in the neck. One graveyard shift, I was sitting in the radio room, with about four trainees, it was winter, quiet and we were bored. I don't know who thought of this idea (cough), but we decided to call this guy, as he was working out at teletype (in a separate area of the Comm Center), and let him know about the massive 10.5 earthquake that had just hit San Francisco.

So...we typed up this fake message, supposedly from the California Office of Emergency Services (this text "blinked"), followed by a row of commands to ring the teletype bell, followed by the announcement that a 10.5 earthquake had struck San Francisco, and that a tsunami was traveling through the Carquinez Straights towards our City (which was situated between the American and Sacramento Rivers), and that we had 30 minutes to evacuate citizens in low lying areas around those rivers before the tsunami would strike.

We added some info about the CA National Guard being deployed, yadda yadda, and tried to make it sound as official as we could.

We signed the message with the name of one of our more notorious 5150's (mental cases), with the follow up phone number of 922 (the CA penal code for a drunk) - 5150 (the CA Health and Safety code for a mental patient), and then WAY at the bottom of the message, included a variation of the dialog from the movie, "Harvey," when Wilson looks up the definition of "pooka" in the dictionary: "And how are you tonight, [name of employee]?"

The Radio Room had a glass wall facing the Communications and Teletype area, and we could see this employee, working in the area of the teletype machine. We called the Radio Sgt., and advised him of what was going to happen, and then took our teletype machine off line and called the machine out at Teletype. (We had a machine to run vehicle license plates for vehicle stops and pursuits, Teletype ran wants and warrants, gun checks, and all the other information requests.)

It worked perfectly! The employee had (by chance) left his monitor in the receive mode, so he "heard" the bells dinging, turned out around, and you could see him reading the text as it displayed on the monitor. At one point, he cupped his hands and yelled out to us, "Earthquake!" After the message had been delivered, he ripped off the paper transmission, and ran to the Radio Sgt to advise him of the message. The Radio Sgt. read the message, wadded it up, and tossed it in the garbage can, saying something to the effect, you can't trust the OES.

I think it was at this point the employee knew he had been had.

(Trust me, we were close enough to San Francisco, that we would have felt a 6.0 quake, let alone a 10.5.)

I think he lasted another month, and then wisely decided to move onto other employment endeavors.

[George]

LOL...haha.

I guess its possible that people don't know the "eleven key" like the "press any key" HAHA