Who: Josh Russo What: The power outage begins, and Josh is in his element When: Backdated to Monday morning Where: The dispatch center Warnings: None Status: Complete narrative
Josh had been in the middle of a call when the outage began. The dispatch center had backup generators, but the system they used to actually do their jobs? Had gone down hard. And when it didn't come back up after a few minutes, Josh knew this wasn't going to be good. He also knew exactly what they needed to do, and so he tracked down his supervisor -- who had, thankfully, already made her way out onto the floor.
"How bad is it?" he asked quietly as he approached.
"Doesn't look good," was the reply. "We need to act fast and -- "
"I know what to do," he interrupted. "I know exactly what to do. This happened once back home. We're going old school."
"You don't get to make decisions on this, Mr. Russo."
"Write me up later, fire me, whatever. I know what I'm doing and I know what we need to do."
And that was how, five minutes later, he found himself standing in the middle of the room.
"Alright, so, listen up. Power's on, CAD system's down, digital lines are routed through the network so that's not happening. Analog, however? Those lines still work. We're going old school, people." He showed off the cards in his hands. "Red for fire, white for police, yellow for medical. Get the important details. Get cross streets, landmarks, whatever's going to help you direct resources where they need to go."
"We don't dispatch police, Mr. Russo, that's the other center."
"Today we do," Josh said as the cards and radios were handed out, followed by the street maps. "The police side of things is going to be slammed, so do not kick those calls back over. Any other day, we'd be fine. Today, that might be a different story. Dispatch whatever you need to, if you're not comfortable with that then patch the calls over to me and I'll do it."
His supervisor looked pissed. "Mr. Russo -- "
"Write me up or fire me later," he said sharply. "If you want to have a pissing contest, talk to me whenever the power comes back up. In the meantime, we're doing this."
"Oh, believe me, we're having a conversation after this is all over."
"Fine by me," Josh replied. "I'm more concerned with getting the town through this safely. Now how about you put your issues aside and start working? Cover the floor, make sure we don't end up with duplicate calls going on the map."
"You're not the boss, Mr. Russo. You're also not a supervisor."
"Write me up or fire me later, because right now I'm the one who knows what we're doing."
Yeah, that was one hundred percent going to be his mantra for the foreseeable future.