When I started piecing this episode together, I remembered what was probably one of my

busiest single hours of work ever.

This was a long time ago.

I can't remember exactly the date or even the year, but I'm guessing it was somewhere

around 2004 or 2005.

The way radio dispatch works, whether it's police or fire department,

those radios always have to have someone monitoring them. Every day, every hour, nonstop,

24-7, 365. That means there's someone always sitting there at the radio. So if the dispatcher on that radio has to use the bathroom or is getting up for a lunch,

someone else has to come and relieve them on the radio.

During the hour I'm talking about, that's what I was doing.

I was relieving a police radio for a lunch break.

When I got there, the dispatcher told me nothing big was going on.

I looked at the screens and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

But as soon as the previous dispatcher left, I got an emergency call.

It was a person with a weapon.

There was also a domestic relationship involved with it, an ex-boyfriend. From the text of the call,

I could tell this was a bad one. The ex-boyfriend was trying to break out windows in the house with a bat.

The updates I got immediately after I dispatched officers was that the ex had made entry inside the house

through the window, and the last thing the call taker had heard was a female caller screaming, and then the phone went dead.

Officers from all over the sector I was working, checked en route to it.

Just as those officers were on the way to the first call, I got another emergency call.

This was a hold-up alarm in a bank.

...