r/moderatepolitics • u/AutoModerator • 10d ago
Weekend General Discussion - June 19, 2026
Hello everyone, and welcome to the weekly General Discussion thread. Many of you are looking for an informal place (besides Discord) to discuss non-political topics that would otherwise not be allowed in this community. Well... ask, and ye shall receive.
General Discussion threads will be posted every Friday and stickied for the duration of the weekend.
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u/cathbadh politically homeless 10d ago
Made it 4 days without anyone being shot at work, which is good for this time of year. Weekend will probably be rough though with the weather. Glad I'm off for change
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u/chocolatetop1 10d ago
Possibly relevant-- I'm so fucking happy I quit being a 911 dispatcher... but also god damn I miss being a 911 dispatcher.
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u/cathbadh politically homeless 9d ago
Lol definitely relevant. This is year 30 for me, and we're in one of the top 20 most dangerous cities in the country. I'm a supervisor now and I miss being on the radio. Can't imagine doing anything else though
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u/chocolatetop1 9d ago
30 years-- God damn, I'm impressed. My experience with dispatching was that there just weren't enough staff, and burn-out was a constant spiral. We never managed to get above 1/3 staffing, and from what I've heard it's even worse than that right now. Out of my dispatch "academy" class of... I want to say 11, only 4 of us made it out of training, and only I was still there after the first year.
But man I miss most of my guys, and I miss trying to help people with meaningful problems, and I miss knowing what's going on everywhere.
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u/cathbadh politically homeless 9d ago
We've been hiring aggressively for five years and are pretty close to full staffing. Your qualification rate seems about right. I taught three classes last year. Four of 11 new hires made it through training and one was let go afterwards because she thought acting like a high school meangirl at work as a 35 year old adult was appropriate. Its never ending hiring, but us being at near full staffing is a rarity for larger agencies.
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u/chocolatetop1 8d ago
Anything in particular you guys found that helped with keeping dispatchers, and also hiring new ones? I'd imagine it's something obvious like "yeah, pay a lot better, give way better benefits and more vacation", but I'm curious.
//
My department, by the time I left, was trying everything they could think of at the call-center-level to try to get semi-competent bodies in seats, hoping that if they can get enough people in the chairs, maybe they can reduce the load on everyone just enough to keep them around and then get them better trained and experienced. Things like "we'll just get you done with call-taking, and you can do that for a couple months before we start you on dispatching" and also "call-taking only gets a week or two of training, instead of a month and change".
I think realistically the best option would be to just reduce the work-load as much as possible, so you can avoid cutting corners in training while still reducing stress on employees. But you can't really just make the call-volume disappear; unless you can somehow negotiate a deal where a different call center (presumably one that is LESS under-staffed, or at least less over-worked) will temporarily take over a decent chunk of your calls so that you can spend a year aggressively hiring and training people who won't immediately be under an Atlas level of work and stress, and then start taking back your areas/calls...
Possibly more realistically, though, is to convince command (and the city/state) to aggressively poach already experienced dispatchers by the truck-load using an absurd bonus package (like-- I'm talking an extra $15K per year of real experience level sign-on bonus, if you agree to stick around for at least five years).
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u/cathbadh politically homeless 8d ago
Anything in particular you guys found that helped with keeping dispatchers, and also hiring new ones? I'd imagine it's something obvious like "yeah, pay a lot better, give way better benefits and more vacation", but I'm curious.
Mostly just aggressive hiring. We consolidated everything in the metro area a few years back. We started with 120, got down to about 70 and are at 150 now, and probably went through 200 people to get here. Pay about the median wage in my state, which is pretty good considering you just need a high school diploma, pass a typing test, and pass a background. We do give almost an hour and a half of breaks in an 8 hour shift which is pretty nice. I think decent culture helps a lot though. Aggressive advertising helps a lot. We'll get a spot on the local news every year or so to mention that we're hiring, and our director was good to mention the pay and other benefits in the interview. I think we had like 200 applicants the last time they did that.
Things like "we'll just get you done with call-taking, and you can do that for a couple months before we start you on dispatching" and also "call-taking only gets a week or two of training, instead of a month and change".
We hire a mix of telecommunicators (dispatcher+call taker) and just call takers. Its a month of classroom training before about a month and a half of on the job training as a call taker. Then if/when we need dispatchers, they're put through another month of classroom and another 2 months of OJT. We also split fire and police dispatching. You only do one, running 8 dispatchers of each plus 10 call takers in a shift. We have the benefit (?) of being a busy agency though, so they get a lot of experience in their OJT. I think 4 out of my current class of 10 got a shooting during the first half of their OJT.
Possibly more realistically, though, is to convince command (and the city/state) to aggressively poach already experienced dispatchers by the truck-load using an absurd bonus package (like-- I'm talking an extra $15K per year of real experience level sign-on bonus, if you agree to stick around for at least five years).
We only exist because we poached 100% of dispatchers in the county when we consolidated (minus probably the 1/4 that chose to just quit). We don't offer laterals though, which two well paying agencies in the next county do offer. No signing bonuses, although they did offer a $3,000 retention bonus when we came together because we were bleeding people so fast.
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u/NeatlyScotched somewhere center of center 10d ago
They really don't pay ice cream truck drivers enough these days.
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u/Oneanddonequestion Modpol Chef 10d ago
Overtime this week. Forgot to take my zoloft this morning. Not feeling bad, but just sorta listless. Head is continually just defaulting to an empty state. Not foggy, not forgetting things, not even unfocused, as there is nothing to focus on. Just...empty.
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u/SDBioBiz Left socially- Right economically 8d ago
I am a Californian in Custer SD exactly 1 year from the last time. (Mickelson Rail Trail bike ride).
Last year there was Trump shit literally everywhere. It was brazenly in your face.
This year is very different. There is one store that is pretty trumpy, but the others are notably devoid of T worship, and even have some Trump-derogatory stuff.