Oops!

Y’ever have a day when everything is going well, then you screw something up and don’t even realize it until later?

It doesn’t have to be a big mistake, although it could be. It could be something that only you will ever know about. If you are like me, it haunts you.

The beautiful thing about my job is that, to be successful, you have to own up to your own mistakes immediately. It’s better to rat out yourself than be “caught” later appearing either oblivious or as if you were trying to sweep something under the rug.

I tell my recruits that the folks who are good dispatchers are the ones who second and third guess themselves and who agonize over their errors, at least for a day or so. I also say that those folks will probably die early of a stress-related illness, but that they will be good dispatchers in the meantime. I’m smiling when I say this, but I’m not entirely kidding.

Two months short of 10 years on the job and I’m still screwing up here and there. Again, usually nothing serious – it could be a typo like putting a description in a call like “SUSP LSW (last seen wearing) BLU BBCAP, GRN SHIT, BLK PANTS.” Oh yeah, he’s really wearing a blue baseball cap, a green shirt, and black pants but GRN SHIT sometimes leaps out of your fingers and into the call.

Sometimes it’s a misstatement on the radio. In the heat of dispatching six officers to six different calls in a hurry so they didn’t decide to do something on their own and get tied up while I still have dozens of calls waiting for officers, I once sent an officer to a non-injury accident involving a green Chevy sedan and a “Black Suzuki Grand Viagra.” My co-worker RR immediately said “Yeah, comes with its own lift kit.” Okay, so it’s really called a Grand Vitara. The fact that a dozen officers called in to mock me on the phone afterward was punishment enough.

All this babbling being said, here’s something in the news that takes a little of that sting away. No matter what stupid mistakes I have made at my job, I have yet to make one like this:

Car Ticketed With Dead Body at the Wheel

AP Oct 21, 6:26 AM (ET)

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - A traffic warden slapped a parking ticket on a car which had its dead driver slumped at the wheel outside an Australian shopping mall, an official said Friday.

The body of the 71-year-old man, whose identity was not immediately released, was discovered Thursday in a parking lot in the southern city of Melbourne, The Age newspaper reported Friday.

The man had been reported missing nine days earlier and was known to be seriously ill, the newspaper said.

Nevertheless, a parking officer who inspected the vehicle failed to notice the man inside and issued the parking fine two days before his body was discovered.

Paul Denham, the mayor of Maroondah council, where the man was found, said the parking officer was "distressed" to learn that the dead man had been inside the car.

"Our local laws officer checked and wrote out the ticket at the rear of the vehicle and placed the ticket from the passenger side on the windscreen," Denham said in a statement. "The local laws officer did not notice anything unusual regarding the vehicle, and is extremely distressed to have learned of the situation."