secret_history (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
secret_history) wrote2006-11-02 12:53 pm
secret_history) wrote2006-11-02 12:53 pm
November 1st, 14:52
The lady in the grey coat was getting more comfortable now. She removed her beret and folded it carefully in half before placing it in her bag, then undid the first three buttons of her coat, revealing a beige turtleneck underneath the thick layer of down. Marco had slouched further in his seat, crossing one heavily-booted ankle over his knee. A young woman with sandy blond hair wearing a Mountain Co-op hiking jacket, faded blue jeans and sturdy hiking boots was asleep in the seat diagonally across from them. Michaela couldn’t tell if she’d been asleep the whole time, or of she was even aware that the metro had stopped. A large rucksack was wedged between her legs, as much to keep it upright as to prevent theft. It looked far too heavy for anyone to bother to try to steal it anyway, Michaela thought. She wondered what the girl had in there, then dismissed the idle thought.
“Is it very difficult, to be an emergency dispatcher?” the woman in the grey coat was asking her.
Michaela shrugged, a bit uncomfortable with the question. “Um, sort of. I mean, you get used to it, right? You mostly have to be really good at multitasking, and you have to know how to talk to people. On the phone, I mean,” she added, seeing that the woman looked a bit perplexed. She wasn’t exactly a people person face-to-face.
“Do you get trained in special techniques for talking to people?”
“Uh, sometimes. You get trained so that you know what kind of questions to ask, you know? You have to know what to ask first, like where the emergency is happening, and whether or not the person themselves is in danger, or whatever. Your first priority is to keep your caller safe, and then to deal with whatever else is going on.”
The punk kid was listening with interest as well. “So, you’re like the voice on the line at 911?” he asked, looking impressed in spite of himself.
Michaela nodded self-consciously.
“That’s cool, man. So, do you, like, deal with crazy people and shit all the time?”
She shrugged, a bit uncomfortable. Behind her, the yuppie had managed to get a faint signal on his Blackberry and was shouting into it, as though that would somehow increase the quality of reception. “No, you have to tell them I’m going to be late! Did you hear me? Yeah, I’m on the metro. No, I don’t know. What? I’m sorry, the reception is really shitty on this thing. What? Yeah, no. I’m stuck here for a while. Can you get them to postpone? What? I don’t know. Figure something out? Yeah. Uh-huh. No. No! What? Yeah. Look, I don’t know. Maybe an hour? I’ll call you as soon as I know anything else. Yeah. Right. Okay, bye!”
The punk kid rolled his eyes, and Michaela found herself secretly agreeing with his assessment, although she supposed that it was basic courtesy for the guy to let people know that he was going to be late. If only he wasn’t being a responsible businessman at the top of his lungs.
“People aren’t crazy, for the most part,” she answered the kid’s question. He wasn’t really a kid, she realized, and was probably around twenty-three or twenty-four. Not much younger than she was, at twenty-nine, but somehow those five years seemed to make a huge difference right now. Maybe because she remembered being a smart-assed know-it-all at his age too. “It’s just that awful and dangerous situations make them seem crazier than they are. Most people don’t cope well with seeing someone they love in danger or in pain. They don’t cope well with witnessing even total strangers in pain.”
The kid seemed a bit disappointed with her answer. “So, like, what’s the worst case you ever had to deal with?”
Marco straightened in his seat and fixed the kid with a level stare. “You’re pretty ghoulish, you know that? Why the hell are you asking this sort of thing?”
Michaela waved a hand at him to get him to back off. The questions were normal enough, and after a little over a year of working for the dispatch centre, she was used to answering queries like this. People were curious, and on a certain level it reassured them to know that other people were afraid and panicked under the right conditions. Besides, her supervisors and her trainers had all encouraged her and the rest of the team to talk about what they did: it made people feel better about calling in during an emergency. Sure, it wasn’t always an emergency, but better they call for a non-emergency than not call when they really needed to for fear that their emergency wasn’t “real” or not serious enough.
“I can’t really tell you about the calls I take, because it violates people’s privacy,” she told the kid as seriously as she could without sounding condescending. “But I’ve dealt with autoroute accidents and robberies and fires, and a couple of times there’ve been calls about people threatening to commit suicide. Traffic accidents are the most common.”
The kid had bristled at Marco’s hostile tone, but didn’t appear to want to make an issue of it. For one thing, Marco looked like he outweighed the punk boy by about fifty pounds of muscle. It was one of the reasons Michaela liked travelling on the metro with her friend: it kept most of the crazies away from her. She was the one who’d arranged to have Marco work in the IT department of the call centre: all the dispatchers, while not dependent on their computers, were nevertheless much happier when all the systems were up and functional, and Marco was very good at what he did. She wasn’t entirely sure what his exact job description was, apart from “guy who makes the computers do what we want them to do,” but she knew that the call centre had come to rely pretty consistently on his skills and that of the two other guys who worked in IT with him.
The good part about Marco’s job was that he was essentially allowed to make his own hours, and since he was as much of a night owl as she was, he usually made a point of keeping the same hours as she did. It was a small kindness, and she appreciated it more than she ever let on.
“Attention: une intervention des services d’urgence nous oblige à interrompre le service sur la ligne verte entre les stations Angrignon et Honoré-Beaugrand. Le service devrait reprendre à quinze heures, trente minutes. La STM vous remercie de votre compréhension. D’autres messages suivront.”
“What did she say?” the lady in the grey coat asked, her blue eyes blinking anxiously behind the red frames of her glasses.
“They say that they’re going to start the service up again in about half an hour.” Michaela translated for her.
“They’re scraping the person off the tracks, then?” Marco grinned at her.
“Marco, that’s not funny.”
He subsided, looking abashed and a bit sulky. “Sorry.”
She smiled at the lady, whose complexion was beginning to resemble her coat. “Looks like we’re going to be here for a while. My name’s Michaela, but everyone calls me Mickey.” She extended her hand toward the woman.
The woman started a bit, as though Michaela’s hand was really a poisonous snake that had a just tried to bite her. Then, gingerly, she reached out with a gloved hand and shook it. “I’m Marlene.” Her voice caressed the syllables of her name, and Michaela found herself smiling in spite of herself.
“And this is my friend Marco,” she nodded at Marco, who sat up straighter and put out his hand for Marlene to shake.
“It’s a pleasure,” he said briskly. To Michaela’s surprise, Marlene blushed a deep shade of crimson and smiled shyly at him. Good Lord, she thought, she thinks he’s attractive! Well, it wasn’t altogether surprising: although she would never dream of having Marco as a boyfriend, he was pretty good-looking, and kept himself in good shape.
“I’m Paul,” the punk kid put in, apparently unwilling to be left out of the foxhole bonding that was going on.
“It’s nice to meet you, Paul,” she said, trying to keep a straight face. Poor kid. He probably got left out of a lot of things at school when he was younger.
“So, is it, like, really only going to take them half an hour to get it all sorted out?” he asked.
“Probably not,” she admitted. “More like an hour, maybe more, depending on where the accident took place and how much of the power they have to cut off in order to get there. The fact that we’re stuck in the metro tunnel and haven’t moved to the next station isn’t a good sign. Usually they’d move all the trains as slowly as possible to the nearest stations to let people get out.”
“Shit. I’m going to be really late for class,” Paul muttered.
“Oh yeah? What are you studying?”
“Communications. I’m at Concordia right now. Third year.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah, it’s okay. It’s a lot of work, though.”
“So I hear. But after that you’ll be able to find work pretty much anywhere. It’s a good program.”
“Yeah.” Paul didn’t seem convinced.
“My son is in his first year at Concordia,” Marlene interrupted them. Michaela turned to her in surprise: the woman had been so quiet that she’d all but forgotten her presence there. “Do you know him? His name is Patrick. Patrick Dowd.”
Michaela bit very hard on the inside of her lip so as not to smile at the last name which was so very close to the one-word description she’d come up with for the woman. It was a very uncharitable thing to think.
“No, I don’t know him,” Paul’s tone was impatient. Poor Mrs. Dowd obviously hadn’t figured out just how many students there were at Concordia. She clearly thought that if her boy was of an age with Paul and went to the same university, then they must know each other. It was a bit like visiting the United States and being asked if you knew ‘Jane from Canada,’ as though Canada had a population of thirty people instead of thirty-six million.
“It’s a pretty big university,” she said, almost as though she was apologizing for Paul’s brusqueness.
“Of course,” Maureen murmured, gazing at her grey woolen gloves with fixed intensity, her cheeks flaming, visibly embarassed at having committed some sort of faux pas but equally uncertain what that faux pas might have been.
Just then, with a sound like a dying sigh, the power went out.
“Is it very difficult, to be an emergency dispatcher?” the woman in the grey coat was asking her.
Michaela shrugged, a bit uncomfortable with the question. “Um, sort of. I mean, you get used to it, right? You mostly have to be really good at multitasking, and you have to know how to talk to people. On the phone, I mean,” she added, seeing that the woman looked a bit perplexed. She wasn’t exactly a people person face-to-face.
“Do you get trained in special techniques for talking to people?”
“Uh, sometimes. You get trained so that you know what kind of questions to ask, you know? You have to know what to ask first, like where the emergency is happening, and whether or not the person themselves is in danger, or whatever. Your first priority is to keep your caller safe, and then to deal with whatever else is going on.”
The punk kid was listening with interest as well. “So, you’re like the voice on the line at 911?” he asked, looking impressed in spite of himself.
Michaela nodded self-consciously.
“That’s cool, man. So, do you, like, deal with crazy people and shit all the time?”
She shrugged, a bit uncomfortable. Behind her, the yuppie had managed to get a faint signal on his Blackberry and was shouting into it, as though that would somehow increase the quality of reception. “No, you have to tell them I’m going to be late! Did you hear me? Yeah, I’m on the metro. No, I don’t know. What? I’m sorry, the reception is really shitty on this thing. What? Yeah, no. I’m stuck here for a while. Can you get them to postpone? What? I don’t know. Figure something out? Yeah. Uh-huh. No. No! What? Yeah. Look, I don’t know. Maybe an hour? I’ll call you as soon as I know anything else. Yeah. Right. Okay, bye!”
The punk kid rolled his eyes, and Michaela found herself secretly agreeing with his assessment, although she supposed that it was basic courtesy for the guy to let people know that he was going to be late. If only he wasn’t being a responsible businessman at the top of his lungs.
“People aren’t crazy, for the most part,” she answered the kid’s question. He wasn’t really a kid, she realized, and was probably around twenty-three or twenty-four. Not much younger than she was, at twenty-nine, but somehow those five years seemed to make a huge difference right now. Maybe because she remembered being a smart-assed know-it-all at his age too. “It’s just that awful and dangerous situations make them seem crazier than they are. Most people don’t cope well with seeing someone they love in danger or in pain. They don’t cope well with witnessing even total strangers in pain.”
The kid seemed a bit disappointed with her answer. “So, like, what’s the worst case you ever had to deal with?”
Marco straightened in his seat and fixed the kid with a level stare. “You’re pretty ghoulish, you know that? Why the hell are you asking this sort of thing?”
Michaela waved a hand at him to get him to back off. The questions were normal enough, and after a little over a year of working for the dispatch centre, she was used to answering queries like this. People were curious, and on a certain level it reassured them to know that other people were afraid and panicked under the right conditions. Besides, her supervisors and her trainers had all encouraged her and the rest of the team to talk about what they did: it made people feel better about calling in during an emergency. Sure, it wasn’t always an emergency, but better they call for a non-emergency than not call when they really needed to for fear that their emergency wasn’t “real” or not serious enough.
“I can’t really tell you about the calls I take, because it violates people’s privacy,” she told the kid as seriously as she could without sounding condescending. “But I’ve dealt with autoroute accidents and robberies and fires, and a couple of times there’ve been calls about people threatening to commit suicide. Traffic accidents are the most common.”
The kid had bristled at Marco’s hostile tone, but didn’t appear to want to make an issue of it. For one thing, Marco looked like he outweighed the punk boy by about fifty pounds of muscle. It was one of the reasons Michaela liked travelling on the metro with her friend: it kept most of the crazies away from her. She was the one who’d arranged to have Marco work in the IT department of the call centre: all the dispatchers, while not dependent on their computers, were nevertheless much happier when all the systems were up and functional, and Marco was very good at what he did. She wasn’t entirely sure what his exact job description was, apart from “guy who makes the computers do what we want them to do,” but she knew that the call centre had come to rely pretty consistently on his skills and that of the two other guys who worked in IT with him.
The good part about Marco’s job was that he was essentially allowed to make his own hours, and since he was as much of a night owl as she was, he usually made a point of keeping the same hours as she did. It was a small kindness, and she appreciated it more than she ever let on.
“Attention: une intervention des services d’urgence nous oblige à interrompre le service sur la ligne verte entre les stations Angrignon et Honoré-Beaugrand. Le service devrait reprendre à quinze heures, trente minutes. La STM vous remercie de votre compréhension. D’autres messages suivront.”
“What did she say?” the lady in the grey coat asked, her blue eyes blinking anxiously behind the red frames of her glasses.
“They say that they’re going to start the service up again in about half an hour.” Michaela translated for her.
“They’re scraping the person off the tracks, then?” Marco grinned at her.
“Marco, that’s not funny.”
He subsided, looking abashed and a bit sulky. “Sorry.”
She smiled at the lady, whose complexion was beginning to resemble her coat. “Looks like we’re going to be here for a while. My name’s Michaela, but everyone calls me Mickey.” She extended her hand toward the woman.
The woman started a bit, as though Michaela’s hand was really a poisonous snake that had a just tried to bite her. Then, gingerly, she reached out with a gloved hand and shook it. “I’m Marlene.” Her voice caressed the syllables of her name, and Michaela found herself smiling in spite of herself.
“And this is my friend Marco,” she nodded at Marco, who sat up straighter and put out his hand for Marlene to shake.
“It’s a pleasure,” he said briskly. To Michaela’s surprise, Marlene blushed a deep shade of crimson and smiled shyly at him. Good Lord, she thought, she thinks he’s attractive! Well, it wasn’t altogether surprising: although she would never dream of having Marco as a boyfriend, he was pretty good-looking, and kept himself in good shape.
“I’m Paul,” the punk kid put in, apparently unwilling to be left out of the foxhole bonding that was going on.
“It’s nice to meet you, Paul,” she said, trying to keep a straight face. Poor kid. He probably got left out of a lot of things at school when he was younger.
“So, is it, like, really only going to take them half an hour to get it all sorted out?” he asked.
“Probably not,” she admitted. “More like an hour, maybe more, depending on where the accident took place and how much of the power they have to cut off in order to get there. The fact that we’re stuck in the metro tunnel and haven’t moved to the next station isn’t a good sign. Usually they’d move all the trains as slowly as possible to the nearest stations to let people get out.”
“Shit. I’m going to be really late for class,” Paul muttered.
“Oh yeah? What are you studying?”
“Communications. I’m at Concordia right now. Third year.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“Yeah, it’s okay. It’s a lot of work, though.”
“So I hear. But after that you’ll be able to find work pretty much anywhere. It’s a good program.”
“Yeah.” Paul didn’t seem convinced.
“My son is in his first year at Concordia,” Marlene interrupted them. Michaela turned to her in surprise: the woman had been so quiet that she’d all but forgotten her presence there. “Do you know him? His name is Patrick. Patrick Dowd.”
Michaela bit very hard on the inside of her lip so as not to smile at the last name which was so very close to the one-word description she’d come up with for the woman. It was a very uncharitable thing to think.
“No, I don’t know him,” Paul’s tone was impatient. Poor Mrs. Dowd obviously hadn’t figured out just how many students there were at Concordia. She clearly thought that if her boy was of an age with Paul and went to the same university, then they must know each other. It was a bit like visiting the United States and being asked if you knew ‘Jane from Canada,’ as though Canada had a population of thirty people instead of thirty-six million.
“It’s a pretty big university,” she said, almost as though she was apologizing for Paul’s brusqueness.
“Of course,” Maureen murmured, gazing at her grey woolen gloves with fixed intensity, her cheeks flaming, visibly embarassed at having committed some sort of faux pas but equally uncertain what that faux pas might have been.
Just then, with a sound like a dying sigh, the power went out.