If stuff ain’t broke, sometimes we fix stuff anyway so stuff don’t break at a worse time for stuff to be broke.
I broke my stuff
Every now and then the good people working in an emergency 911 center have to grin and bear it for a little while during system maintenance. There’s lots o’ computers in a 911 center. Phones, radio frequencies, Computer Aided Dispatch programs, alarm boards, court computers, records, all those things break from time to time. To avoid stuff breaking on the regular, occasionally stuff has to be broke on purpose. Scheduled system maintenance. Here’s how I felt about it on December 13, 2017…
As a career long midnight shift dweller, I was subject to living through system maintenance quite often. It makes sense, I suppose. You play the odds that there’s less going on at 3 in the morning so there’s less of a chance of maintenance affecting some kind of emergency or critical response event. Although maintenance made even the most routine activities harder to deal with, for the most part it’s a sound practice. You just announce to patrol units that maintenance is starting and the 911 center will just be a room with sleepy people in it for a while and patrol units won’t bother with traffic stops or running license plates or checking names for local warrants because all those things take computers and computers are bye bye for now. Just a quiet couple of hours listening to the crickets chirp. Or the snowfall. Depends on what month it is.
But
When 911 rings and an actual something happens somewhere that’s bad, the shift becomes a seat of your pants thrill ride resulting in one word cursing followed by sentence long cursing followed by a profane dissertation followed by 7 AM whiskey.