This is a collection of all the immutable Dispatch Laws of Existance - similar to Murphy's Laws, but
covering many more bases. I was given a set of Laws pertaining to EMS and found them easily edited
for Communications Center situations. It was fun tweaking them to fit - enjoy!
The First Law of Comm Centers:
All emergency radio traffic will wait until you begin to eat, regardless of the time.
- Corollary 1 - Fewer emergency incidents would occur if dispatchers would never eat.
- Corollary 2 - Always bring food that doesn’t need to be heated.
- Corollary 3 - The snack machine will malfunction and "eat" your money.
The First Rule of Radios:
Any essential repeater will never malfunction or fail until:
- You need it to handle a pursuit.
- The technician leaves.
The Second Rule of Radios:
Interchangeable parts don’t, foolproof functions fail, and automatic
functions need buttons pushed first.
The Comm Center Laws of Time:
- There is absolutely no relationship between the time at which you are supposed
to get off shift and the time at which you will get off shift.
- Given the following equation: T minus 1 Minute equals Relief Time (T -1 = RT),
T will always be the time of the last emergency incident call you have to handle before
the end of your shift. E.g., If you are supposed to get off shift at 2200, units will go in pursuit at 2159.
The Comm Center Rule of Random Simultaneity:
Emergency calls will randomly come in all at once.
The Comm Center "Tardy" Law of Time and Distance:
The distance between your relief’s residence and the Comm Center increases as the time
to the end of your shift decreases, directly in relation to how many minutes late your relief woke up.
Corollary 1 - The shortest distance between the Comm Center and your relief’s home is under construction.
The First Law of Leaving for Work Late:
No matter how fast you drive to get to work before your shift starts, it will not be fast enough to get you
there on time, unless you pass a marked unit, at which point it will be entirely too fast.
The Comm Center Law of Time Usage:
The number of keystrokes per minute needed to enter requests for field units
varies inversely with the amount of time between transmissions from other field units.
Comm Center Rules of the Bathroom:
If a 9-1-1 line rings between 0500 and 0700, you will be on your way to the bathroom.
If you have just gone to the bathroom, no call will be received. If you have not just gone
to the bathroom, you will soon regret it. The probability of getting a complicated 9-1-1 call
increases proportionately to the time elapsed since last going to the bathroom.
The Comm Center Theory of Relativity:
The number of distraught and hysterical callers with cell phones reporting any given incident
varies exponentially with the seriousness of the event.
The Comm Center Theory of Value:
The meaning of the caller’s incoherent screams which must be deciphered increases
by the square of the sum of the number of units which must be sent to handle the incident
plus the number of requests to repeat the last transmission for the field supervisor(s).
- Corollary 1 - Very serious calls tend to gravitate toward remote locations.
- Corollary 2 - If the location is rural, the landmarks are unfamiliar.
The Comm Center Law of Volume:
As the seriousness of any telephone report increases, the availability of volume to
hear the information decreases.
The First Principle of Seriousness:
In any hit and run accident, the degree of damage is inversely proportional
to the distance the caller will follow the suspect while talking to you on his/her cell phone - on 9-1-1.
The Comm Center Rule of Space:
The amount of floor space to cover to get to a particular manual varies inversely with
the urgency which drives the need for the manual.
Corollary 1 - Visiting Brass will always mill about talking to one another in the space between your
console and the bookcases.
The Comm Center Law of Gravity:
Any manual, when dropped, will always come to rest binder up, rings open, with pages strewn all over the floor.
In random order.
The Law of Standard Operating Procedures:
The simplest SOP directive will be worded in the most obscure and complicated manner possible.
Notifications, for example, will be expressed as "telephonic or specific and directed modulated
radio frequency admonishments" and response time as "fractional nano-seconds immediately
subsequent to notifications."
- Corollary 1 - If you don’t understand it, it must be intuitively obvious.
- Corollary 2 - If you can understand it, you probably don’t.
The First Law of Supervisors:
Given the equation: X minus Y equals Quality of Service to the Public, where "X" is the service
you provide and "Y" is the assistance supplied by any Supervisor, if you can eliminate "Y"
from the equation, the Quality of Service will improve by "X."
- Corollary 1 - Generally, Field Supervisors have no business in the field.
- Corollary 2 - The level of technical competence is inversely proportional to the level
of management.
- Corollary 3 - Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
The Law of Academy Instructors:
Those who can’t, teach.
The Law of On-the-Job Trainers:
Those who can neither do nor teach, evaluate.
The Rule of Famous Callers:
Any call made on 9-1-1 by an irate member of any public office will naturally disconnect
without reason at the exact moment prior to you telling him/her to hang on while you transfer,
handle, and/or place that call on hold to stifle an explosive sneeze.
The Rules of Educating Callers about 9-1-1 Abuse:
A life-or-death situation will immediately be created by hanging up on a caller who initially says,
"This isn’t an emergency, but..." The seriousness of this situation will increase as the amount of
media attention is focused upon it. By the time the person you told never to use 9-1-1 again unless
it’s an emergency is shown live on the six o’clock news, members of the Grand Jury will wonder
how a victim of such a terrible crime could possibly have reached the phone to dial three digits
in order to ask you a simple question about the duration of the power outage.
The Rule of Special Field Projects:
All special grants earmarked solely for field unit "extra coverage" and officer
overtime payment are disseminated in amounts which are inversely proportional
to the number of dispatchers staffed in the Center for the duration of the project.
The Basic Principle for Dispatchers:
Assume that all field personnel are idiots until their actions prove your assumption.
Basic Assumptions about a field OIC:
Given the opportunity, the OIC will be only too happy to tell you who to dispatch to
any call, regardless of whether or not (s)he actually knows who’s available.
- Corollary 1 - The existence or non-existence of any given available unit is only
of minor importance to the OIC.
- Corollary 2 - Any unit currently available will suddenly become unavailable.
- Corollary 3 - Any unit you just informed the OIC was unavailable will suddenly announce
(s)he IS available and has been so for some time.
- Corollary 4 - Once you’ve assigned the unit chosen by the OIC to handle the call,
the reporting party will call back and cancel.
- Corollary 5 - If the caller does not cancel, (s)he will call back several times for an ETA.
The Field Axiom of Late-Night Accident calls:
If a unit responds to any motor vehicle accident after midnight and does not find a drunk
on the scene, keep looking - somebody is still missing.
The Rule of Warning Devices:
Any patrol unit, whether it is responding to a call or in pursuit of a suspect, with lights and siren,
will be totally ignored by all motorists, pedestrians and dogs which may be found in or near the
roads along its route.
- Corollary 1 - The window will be down while the officer talks on the radio.
- Corollary 2 - The officer will transmit the most important information with the siren wailing
and the window down, just before arriving without advising you, and will never use the radio again
until screaming for a backup.
The First Rule of Visitors:
Any visitor in the Comm Center wearing a uniform, badge and gun will express amazement at the
work you do, but later inform his partners that everyone was reading romance novels or knitting.
The Second Rule of Visitors:
Always assume that any field officer on a sit-along is a former dispatcher, until proven otherwise.
Corollary 1 - Never snipe about an allied agency Comm Center with a visitor present.
The Law of Show-and-Tell:
A virtually infinite number of wide-eyed and inquisitive school-aged children can gather
around a dispatcher at his/her console, and, given the opportunity, will pick the one experiencing
the worst reception.
- Corollary 1 - No emergency traffic will occur until they are each asking what a separate button does.
- Corollary 2 - It will take at least four times as long to get them away from the console as it took to
gather them around it and make them be quiet.
The Rule of Rookies:
The true value of any rookie dispatcher, when expressed numerically, will always be a negative
number. The value of this number may be determined by simply having the rookie grade his or
her ability on a scale from 1 to 10.
For rookie dispatchers on the telephone: 1 = Lily Tomlin’s "Ernestine," 10 = Your Comm Center’s Dispatcher of the year,
and for rookie dispatchers on the radio: 1= Easy Listening Soft Rock DJ, 10 = APCO Annual INTERNATIONAL Dispatcher
of the Year.
The true value of the rookie is then found by simply negating the rookie’s self-assigned value.
Corollary 1 - Treat any rookie dispatcher assigned to your shift as you would a Visitor.
(See the First Rule of Visitors, above.)
The Rule of Rules:
As soon as a Comm Center Rule is accepted as absolute, an exception to that Rule will
immediately occur.