What a day
So today has been a bad day. Not only did I completely miss breakfast this morning, my favorite meal of the day (mmm...pancakes), this afternoon I got roped into dealing with not one but two emotionally volatile students. Actually one wasn't a student any more, they had left the university at the end of last year. Anyways, I had the unfortunate timing of walking past dispatch when Nathan (dispatching) snaps his fingers at me while he's on the phone. Through a long a difficult process of miming out what he wanted me to do, I picked up the other line and listened in.
It quickly became apparent that there was a highly hysterical girl on the phone going on about her friend who threatened to commit suicide if she didn't sleep with him. Is she worried about this obvious manipulation attempt? Oh no, she's worried that Jesus is going to send her to hell for letting him die because she would never sleep with someone who wasn't married. While Nathan is trying to calm the girl down enough to get all the pertinent information (i.e. the guy's name, phone number, address, what he looks like, etc) I get stuck with the lovely task of calling the RLC, calling 911 to have SPD do a wellness check all the while trying to answer the phones, deal with the walk in customers AND teach the newly hired office (who started at 8:00 this morning) what I was doing and why. Oh yeah, and the lovely former student who tried to get into some poor girl’s pants called and wanted to talk to me about the whole thing. By the time the mess was over I was exhausted and wanted to just go home and go to bed. This whole process took two hours from the start of me walking past dispatch to finally waving goodbye to the lovely SPD officers who stopped by to give us an update after their wellness check.
Normally I thrive on things like this: I love being in the middle and being helpful and getting things done. However it was so hard to do this knowing that barring some sort of emergency tomorrow I'm not ever going to do this again or work with Nathan to make sure that we did all that we could for this person. It is going to be really hard to step back and say goodbye to a place that has been more of a home to me than where I live - to say goodbye to people who have been more of a family to me than my own.
The one good thing about today was that my student workers (past and present) got together to say goodbye and told me how much the loved working for me and working with me. That they loved how caring I was and how even though I pushed them to do a better job I always rewarded them for their hard work.
Unfortunately, that probably made me miss them that much more.
It quickly became apparent that there was a highly hysterical girl on the phone going on about her friend who threatened to commit suicide if she didn't sleep with him. Is she worried about this obvious manipulation attempt? Oh no, she's worried that Jesus is going to send her to hell for letting him die because she would never sleep with someone who wasn't married. While Nathan is trying to calm the girl down enough to get all the pertinent information (i.e. the guy's name, phone number, address, what he looks like, etc) I get stuck with the lovely task of calling the RLC, calling 911 to have SPD do a wellness check all the while trying to answer the phones, deal with the walk in customers AND teach the newly hired office (who started at 8:00 this morning) what I was doing and why. Oh yeah, and the lovely former student who tried to get into some poor girl’s pants called and wanted to talk to me about the whole thing. By the time the mess was over I was exhausted and wanted to just go home and go to bed. This whole process took two hours from the start of me walking past dispatch to finally waving goodbye to the lovely SPD officers who stopped by to give us an update after their wellness check.
Normally I thrive on things like this: I love being in the middle and being helpful and getting things done. However it was so hard to do this knowing that barring some sort of emergency tomorrow I'm not ever going to do this again or work with Nathan to make sure that we did all that we could for this person. It is going to be really hard to step back and say goodbye to a place that has been more of a home to me than where I live - to say goodbye to people who have been more of a family to me than my own.
The one good thing about today was that my student workers (past and present) got together to say goodbye and told me how much the loved working for me and working with me. That they loved how caring I was and how even though I pushed them to do a better job I always rewarded them for their hard work.
Unfortunately, that probably made me miss them that much more.
posted by Rebecca at 6:35 AM
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