LITMIR.BIZ

You answer a call from a fourteen-year-old boy asking for someone to arrest his mother, who is smoking crack in their bathroom. You talk with him until the cops arrive, making sure there are no weapons around and learning that his favorite subject in school is lunch. Five minutes later, you have to deal with someone complaining about his neighbor&#39;s clarinet practice.<br /><br />What is it like to be on the receiving end of desperate calls for help . . . every day? Caroline Burau, a former newspaper reporter and nursing student who couldn&#39;t stand the sight of blood, takes a job as an emergency dispatcher because she likes helping people. But on-the-job training at the comm center proves to be more than she bargained for. As she adjusts to a daily life of catastrophe and comedy, domestics and drunks, cops and robbers, junk food and sarcasm, lost cats and suicides, she discovers that crisis can become routine, that coworkers can be mean&mdash;that she must continue to care and, at times, learn how to let go.<br /><br />Praise for Answering 911<br /><br />&quot;The day may come when I have to dial 911. I hope to God that the person who answers is Caroline Burau or someone like her. Funny, honest, and elegantly simple, this book left me with a sense of grace and hope.&quot; &mdash;Alison McGhee, author of Shadow Baby, Rainlight, Was It Beautiful? and Falling Boy

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“Every day, I think about quitting this job.”?The job of an emergency call operator continues to change: new technology, new drills, new threats to the peace of the community. In this book, the author of Answering 911: Life in the Hot Seat returns, no longer a rookie, with new insights and stories that amaze and astound. ?“I’ve worked with some of the finest, funniest, most caring assholes who’ve ever lived.”?Caroline Burau takes a job in a single-person dispatch center for the city of White Bear Lake, and then becomes a dispatcher for a ground and air ambulance service. ?“There is no beginning to this story, and no end. The dispatch center never closes and the phones never get shut off. There is just call after call after life after death after life again. And so it goes. And we sit in our hot seats: listening, waiting, and answering 911.”?In 31 chapters packed with funny, difficult, and weird stories–and Burau's own sassy attitude–she reminds readers what's necessary to get this job done, and why it's so hard to leave.

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