Doktor, Do People Have an Off Switch?

[Eater of Clowns]

Sometimes I suffer grand delusions of being a person.  I'm not a happy accident of nature stuffed full of cheap carbohydrates and caffeine and distraction.  I realize that I have a functioning mind capable of so much, I begin to stare off to follow that hint of possibility and I lose it as quickly as it came.

I say this because some other times I'm sure I can't be alive.  Times where I talk to relatives of inmates who have had a death in the family, when I get frustrated because they can't gather themselves on the phone to let me direct their calls.  Times where I send an ambulance to a hospital carrying an infant and a terrified mother, and maybe it's maimed or maybe it's a bad cough, but it's a terrifying ride for the parent.  I can picture this and I still can't feel it, not like I can feel the interruption from a good read.  Times like last night, where an inmate is found unresponsive in the health wing, where the nurses had been performing CPR and using the AED until an ambulance arrives, which I then dispatch to learn that there's been no change.  But all I know is that I've got too many phone calls to handle at times like those.  One of those phone calls is a nurse asking for an outside line.  She sounds like she's been crying.

I hear of these things and it's not like watching the news.  I can get angry at the news because it's somebody's fault.  I can get angry at the laws and the politicians and the corporations because it was a conscious decision to bring ill to the world.  Then sometimes, sometimes like last night, awful things happen that nobody can control.  I'm not sure what did it to the inmate last night.  I looked up her suicide attempt history to see if there were any recorded; this was partly to cover my own ass in case I missed one and didn't alert them to keep an eye on her.  There was nothing.  Maybe there is someone to blame, maybe she got the wrong medication, maybe with better supervision she would have made it.  The administrators are going to look to pin it on one of the nurses or officers down there doing the grunt work.  They'll ask them why they didn't do this, didn't do that, because they have the hindsight and their lovely policies and their power.

I won't feel it though.  So Dok, do people have an off switch?  Do I become cold and efficient in the face of such things because I have to be?  Is it a failsafe to avoid an overload of hearing so many things bringing so many lives to a halt, changing so many people?  Please tell me it's so.  Because otherwise, well, I won't have those brief moments anymore, and those mean a lot to me.

[Richter]

I am no Doktor, but I have a few ideas here.  I was only another product of the standard Batch Laureates, with certain deviations, so please regard or disregard as you see fit. 

Other people's drama is their own.  You see it, you touch it, you try to shepherd them through it with your work, but it's never really YOURS.  IF you feel bad fro not getting involved in it, that's good.  Empathy is a good thing, but it was never designed for phone lines, dispatching Emerg. Services, or dealing with the volume of problems that come in.  You do your thing, you help them as best you can, and mindfully get them through their moment of high DUMB, but they can't ever expect you to feel or emote.  You'll be out of their story soon enough, and only an emotional terrorist would expect you to care totally and whole heartedly about every such contact.

As close as I get I hear sob stories too.  I hear anger, I hear frustration, ignorance, and ire that we don't have everything that the fuckheads in sales promised.  I have moods where anyone saying anything warrants "FUCKOFF!" or violence, simply because they are a talking, criticizing human.  I have to be in the right mood to see movies because I just don;t always want another fucking story run in to my brain.

Hang in.  Calm efficiency is the best we can do sometimes.  Even Buddha can only do so much with a phone.

[Eater of Clowns]

I takes reminders sometimes to understand that the voice on the other end of the line is a person.  I'm inconvenienced by the ring, forgetting that even though it's my job to send them to the right place, I've been on the other end of that phone call trying to get help from someone only interested in getting off the phone.  It's appropriate, if slightly rude, of me to rush the average "I think my boyfriend is locked up in there," away, but probably less so the "my father just died and I need to tell my brother."  They become all the same at some point.  As an aside here, I realize Jenne was on the other end of that call recently in trying to contact an inmate.  So for my part, Jenne, I apologize for the role I play in that thoroughly awful experience.

Richter, you are right about it being the necessary and most efficient way of dealing with it.  I'm not a counselor to these people.  It's a sensation I get sometimes, that to help people as best as I can, I need to hurry them along at a time when they want nothing more than to have their business concluded, to maybe find an actual person to be with.  In a sense it feels like becoming less than a person.  I'm not sure I'm describing that disconnect accurately.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have an "Off" button, if you know what I mean.

[Doktor Howl]

I won't feel it though.  So Dok, do people have an off switch?  Do I become cold and efficient in the face of such things because I have to be?  Is it a failsafe to avoid an overload of hearing so many things bringing so many lives to a halt, changing so many people?  Please tell me it's so.  Because otherwise, well, I won't have those brief moments anymore, and those mean a lot to me.

It's called emotional fatigue, and it's very well understood. 

But the thing to remember is, that switch is there for your use.  For example, I spent the last 30 hours being a moral vacuum and trying to get Tucson to eat me, but I'll be a better person for it on Monday morning.  Rested, ready for work, and not feeling like I want to stab 40 people, or - worse - not feeling like the people around me aren't real.

The other thing to remember is that you can't allow yourself to be a human crying towel.  They'll use you right up, and never even know your name.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I won't feel it though.  So Dok, do people have an off switch?  Do I become cold and efficient in the face of such things because I have to be?  Is it a failsafe to avoid an overload of hearing so many things bringing so many lives to a halt, changing so many people?  Please tell me it's so.  Because otherwise, well, I won't have those brief moments anymore, and those mean a lot to me.

It's called emotional fatigue, and it's very well understood. 

But the thing to remember is, that switch is there for your use.  For example, I spent the last 30 hours being a moral vacuum and trying to get Tucson to eat me, but I'll be a better person for it on Monday morning.  Rested, ready for work, and not feeling like I want to stab 40 people, or - worse - not feeling like the people around me aren't real.

The other thing to remember is that you can't allow yourself to be a human crying towel.  They'll use you right up, and never even know your name.

So goddamn  true.