Earthquake.

It's Sat night. It's been fairly busy, what with the fair in town and the citizens trying to kill each other every three seconds down there until the cavalry rolls in a pepper sprays their silly selves....and each other...but anyway, I have other things to be worrying about since I am planning on pulling an all nighter and going to a graduation right after work. At 4am, I have just gotten back from my break and am about to start trying to make myself look acceptable, break out the mirror and walk to the kitchen to wash my hands before I start messing with my face. As I am about halfway thru the room, I here a rumble, and immediately dismiss it, mainly because I am obliviously going thru a checklist of things I need to do before 0630 in my head. Another dispatcher says "what was that?", I say "nothing" and walk to the kitchen.

Theeeeen the phones ring. alot. I poke my head out of the kitchen and notice the computer screens are littered with calls....at 4:09 in the morning.....weird. Turns out "nothing" is actually a 3.0 earthquake and citizens from alllll over the area are calling FREAKING out. I mean psssh, it's just an earthquake, not the end of the world. So I spend the next 30 minutes not really knowing what was going on, along with the rest of the world, telling citizens we are trying to figure out what happened and that the police are investigating. [by investigating I mean sitting in their cars being as clueless as everyone else :) ] I get calls from one of our fire marshalls, a couple sgts, another jurisdictions dispatcher, basically everyone. It was just back to back to back calls in which I could do nothing but tell ppl we thought it was an earthquake but couldn't confirm. Then we finally get confirmation and can start telling people that's what it was. At that point my greeting became something similar to: "Gotham City 911, did you feel your house shake? Yea, ok we had an earthquake, you can go back to sleep :)", about that point the mirror came back out and I went on about my day as I told people it wasn't a bomb, or someone trying to break in, or a car hitting their house, or whatever other crazy idea they had in their minds. this lasted about an hour and was pretty darn entertaining actually. Apparently that's what happens when an earthquake hits. Glad I got that one under my belt! 

Now I come back to work 2 days later and it's back to business as usual, and one of the things the officers had gone over in lineup was a stolen vehicle that had been taken a few days previous, and one officer on our shift was bound and determined to find it. Oh don't worry, he found it....2 houses down from where it was stolen from.....and the guy who stole it was chillin in the house it was in front of....REALLY??? I mean c'mon people. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Try and make it a liiittle harder for the officers to catch you. Let's work on putting some effort in our not getting thrown into jail tactics next time. We also had a very interesting foot pursuit, our officers had a request from a neighboring jurisdiction to check an addy for a wanted subject and they went out to the address, and seemed to be fairly certain the guy was in there so they surrounded the house and played around out there for about an hour and a half trying to get this guy to come out....Then they figure out he's not in there, he bolted somewhere in the woods and was hiding so they could not locate him. They gave up, left the scene and went on to other business. All of a sudden you hear one of our forensic guys key up on the radio.....whispering.....weird? yes. Does this usually mean some shit is about to pop off? Si senorita. Next thing you know.... FOOT PURSUIT! Yup there it goes. Home dude runs out of the woods and right into the officers sight, and it's on. He catches him, suspect gets pepper sprayed somewhere in the mix and then gets carted off to jail. Good day for the officer, Bad day for suspect. Just another weekend in the little city!