Page 105 - NIXBOOK

The young men sitting across the table from me were sharply dressed. They wanted to be police officers, and one by one they
were being interviewed by a panel of citizens and officers, including me. Since this was a civil service testing process, our
instructions were exact and stern that the applicants would all be asked the exact same specific questions, with no deviations.
It was a kind of unsatisfactory process; I couldn’t prompt or correct the applicants, or ask them any follow up questions at all.
One poor guy went off a tangent and started rambling, several minutes later at the end of his time we smiled and said “Thank
you,” and gave him a low score on that one for failing to answer the exact question.

When an especially serious event occurred, the 911 dispatcher would warn everybody first with a special tone of three beeps, not
unlike a truck backing up. That was reserved for bank robberies or bank alarms, or a bad guy brandishing a gun somewhere.
Most of the time the tones were for another police agency, but every single cop listening to that police channel got an adrenaline
rush, preceded with a general feeling of immediate dread when the tones came out. When the event was not in our jurisdiction,
we could breathe a sigh of relief, otherwise if it was indeed for us, it would be time to jump and go hit the lights and sirens. To
a man, every cop I ever met (myself included) did not like hearing those emergency tones and it was pretty much impossible to
not get a heart palpitation every single time we heard it.

Neighbor dispute. I get called. “What’s going on here?” I asked. Home owner pointed to the fence separating him from his
neighbor. “His dog barks a lot, and I can’t stand it anymore, so every time the dog barks, I let off a burst from my air horn here!”