Okay. So we all know that I work for an animal control agency. I am the office person – I manage the office, deal with the public and dispatch calls. Generally, my days are full of a flurry of phone calls, taking complaints and dispatching officers out to field calls. There certainly is a level of stress, but not all stress is bad stress. I think it all keeps me on my toes.
But we have all noticed a pattern. If we have a very quiet day at the office, we're all in for hell the next day. That's just how it goes. We'll have a slow day, then we'll be too busy to possibly take all of the things that fly our way. We've taken to not speaking the "s" word or the "q" word in the office, for fear of jinxing ourselves.
So today my day at the office starts off rather unassumingly. Sadie and I show up for work as usual. I'm taken a bit by surprise to see the personal car of one of our officers parked next to the building. She has been working with us in a supervisory role over the past few weeks while our senior officer has been out on medical leave. In the time that the Good Officer has been with us, we've pretty much managed to suck her into our world, and I think we've seeped into her pores a little bit. She's no longer assigned to us full-time, but she stops by from time to time to see how things are going.
Sadie and I stroll into the office to find the Good Officer making coffee. I look at her and my first words are, "See…you LOVE us!" She laughs and tells me that she has volunteered to come in this morning because there was nobody on schedule to work on cleaning the shelter. She must really love us if she's willing to volunteer to come in and spray poo!
We say our good mornings, and she wanders off to start cleaning the building and I settle into my morning routine. (Minus the making coffee part…which has so graciously been taken care of by the Good Officer.) It is still just before 8am.
The phone rings. I generally won't pick up the phone until I'm logged onto the computer if it isn't 8 yet. But I look at the number and see that it is the police department calling. So I pick up the phone. Before I can even get through my "thank you for calling" spiel, the dispatcher is asking me if we have a field officer available. Nope. Not till 9.
According to Dispatch, there is a momma dog and her pups that have been dropped off at an office complex on the corner of a pretty busy intersection. Momma is wandering around in the street, and citizens are trying to catch her. I ask the dispatcher for a description of the dog, and of course he doesn't have one. Does he know where the puppies are in the complex? I'm told that it'll be obvious where they are – they're in the complex.
Uh…ohhhkaaay. Well, then. I tell the dispatcher that I can see if the officer that volunteered her free morning will be willing to go attempt to catch the dog. We leave it at that, and I hang up the phone.
I go to see the Good Officer, who is wearing galoshes and is in the process of starting to clear out the kennels. "I hate to do this to you," I start, "but there's a momma dog wandering in traffic while her pups are in an office complex on this busy intersection. Would you be willing to go try to catch her?" I see the wheels spinning. She's torn…oh, what the heck. She'll do it.
So she returns to the office to put on her shoes. Looking at her, I offer to ride along to see if I can help her out. (I'm going to throw in a sidebar here…it has been previously noted in our department that I do not run. Period. I will scurry…I may even scamper…but I do not run. The Good Officer is in the same camp as I am – she doesn't run either. She has since notated that she is willing to learn how to scurry or scamper if it might make life easier, but run she will not do.)
We pile into the great big tank of a truck that we have – it is HUGE! We've dubbed it the Mack Daddy. It's an extended cab truck, with all the stainless steel compartments in the back. You can't see out the back window, so you have to rely on your side mirrors and a backup camera. To complicate matters even more, you have to juggle the key on one ring, and the key fob on another ring. Because if you hop out of the truck and leave the key in the ignition, you run the risk of locking yourself out. How embarrassing is that? One of our officers did it the first time he drove the truck and we haven't let him live it down yet.
On the way to the scene, the Good Officer decides that it might be a good idea to contact the supervisor of the day and let her know what we're up to. The phone conversation starts out like this: "You know you're in trouble when I volunteer to come in to clean the shelter, and the secretary and I end up going out on a call to chase dogs." Our supervisor offered to come on-scene with us, but noted that it would only be to watch us in action for her own entertainment. Thanks.
Then the Good officer suddenly seems to realize that neither of us is in a uniform of any kind. No big deal for me – I don't have one. I'm wearing a glittery Mickey Mouse t-shirt, my favorite capris and sandals. She's in jeans and a t-shirt. At least she's got her gun (!) even if she left her badge at home.
We arrive on-scene and see a small, white fluffy dog sniffing around the grass in front of the complex. We stop the Mack Daddy out front and hop out. I step into the grass and look at the little dog. I then look down at my feet and the slide-on sandals that I'm wearing. Hmmm…not only are these not suitable for running in, I probably shouldn't even attempt to scamper or scurry in them. I might break my neck. So I step out of my shoes right there in the grass and leave them.
Well. This little white fluff ball DOES NOT want to be caught. The good officer and I spent awhile chasing it around the complex (I'm barefoot!) and soon see a second one. So now we've got two little dogs to try to catch. I'm quickly learning that dogs can be mighty difficult to catch if they don't want to come to you.
At some point, the Good Officer decides that we're not going to be able to get close enough to these dogs to lasso them with our little leashes, so she walks back to the truck to get one of the longer control sticks. While she's walking back to the truck, she sees my shoes in the grass. Her first thought is, "That's an odd place for shoes." It takes her a minute, but it finally dawns on her that they're my shoes (remember, I'm barefoot) and throws them in the cab of the truck.
While we're working our way through the complex, an older couple decides to try to help us. Even the four of us can't get the dogs. So the Good Officer and I decide that there's just no catching these pups, and start asking where the puppies are. The couple looks at us and asks, "What puppies? Someone dropped off five dogs in this area this morning. These two, a larger one that got hit by a car and ran off, and two other ones. There were no puppies."
Score one for the accuracy of getting your information second-hand.
Well, the two white fluffballs are the only things we've seen in the area, and they've taken off down the street (technically crossing the border out of our jurisdiction) so the Good Officer and I decide to take off.
We turn down the street we saw them take, and there they are. Now it's like they're taunting us. The Good Officer jumps out of the truck, tosses me the key and tells me to follow her in the truck (!!) while she takes off down the street to follow the dogs.
Uh…I've never driven something so big in my life. And I have to back it up to get to where she's going. Holy cow!
Somehow I manage, and get to the area where the Good Officer is with the dogs. But they just don't want to be caught and take off. Again. So it's back in the truck and around the way back to the complex. We hop back out (I'm still barefoot) and circle the complex. By this time, the supervisor has shown up and is checking out the situation.
Supervisor is wearing her khaki uniform pants, a gray t-shirt and her duty belt with badge. I look at her and greet her with, "Hey! It's the girl with the badge!" She looks at me, gets a puzzled expression on her face and asks me, "Where are your shoes?"
So we resume our chase of the dogs. They run out into traffic, across the street, and back to our side of the street. And then they take off down the street. And keep going. I watch them and see where they head…and the Good Officer tells me to get in the truck and meet them down the way. But being in the state that we live in, there are concrete barriers in every median – you generally can't turn left out of a parking lot. So I have to drive this HUGE tank around the block (backing it up first to turn it around!!) and meet up with them in the neighborhood.
So I circle the block (Good Officer is much taller than me…so I keep having to scooch the seat up so that I can reach the pedals...driving barefoot!) and catch up with Supervisor and the Good Officer…back in the office complex parking lot.
While I'm tooling around in the giant truck, I happen to hear another animal call coming in over the radio. Apparently, there is a dog loose in the gated parking lot of the police department and dispatch plans to turn the call over to us to take. Yeah right. I pick up my cell phone and call them – as soon as I identify myself, the dispatcher says, "Oh! We have another call for you!"
I then inform the dispatcher that we are ALL (and I helpfully define ALL to her as the secretary, the Good Officer that volunteered her morning to come in and clean the shelter and the Supervisor that isn't even on the clock yet) out on the first call that they gave us this morning. "Oh," she says, "I'll just hold that call for you, then." Yeah…you just do that.
So back on the chase. I join the Good Officer and the Supervisor back out on the main street trying to catch these critters. By this time, the two little dogs have been joined by a larger dog…I assume it is the one that had been hit by a car earlier in the morning. I'm at least a hundred feet behind Supervisor, so I decide that it'll be easier to just call her on her cell phone to let her know that we have another call pending than to try to yell it to her above the traffic noise. In talking to her on the phone, we decide that the dogs keep running across our jurisdictional line, so we'll just call out the other animal control agency and pass the call on for them to try.
So I start to dial the other agency on my cell phone when two of the funniest things happen…
(1) I see a person run out from the very end of the office complex to help catch the dogs…it's our Adoption Center Employee! Of course, not in uniform. You couldn't have put together a uniform out of anything the four of us were wearing. How sad is that? I just started laughing as hard as I could. Here we all are – the barefoot secretary, the Good Officer wielding a control stick and a gun, the Supervisor in her non-uniform with a duty belt and the Adoption Center Employee in a t-shirt, athletic shorts and flip-flops. Are we a motley crew or what? Apparently, Adoption Center Employee happened to be driving by and saw me on the side of the road (barefoot – she must have thought I was some crazy lady!) with a leash and she thought to herself, "Hey – she has one of those leashes that we use at the shelter…hey…that looks like Supervisor…wait a minute…that's Good Officer!" So she pulled a u-turn (with the dog she's rehabbing because of a bad leg flailing around in the back of her SUV) to see if she could help. What are the odds?
(2) While I'm on the phone, waiting to get through to the other agency, I hear a vehicle pull up and stop next to me. I turn and look, and it is the other agency's animal control truck. My only thought is, "Damn…these guys are fast!" He can't roll down his window, so we're forced to communicate through awkward hand gestures and reading lips. I see him point in the general direction of where these dogs went and mouth something that I can't determine. So I approach the window and hold up two fingers and yell, "THERE ARE TWO SMALL DOGS," and then I change my gesture to two hands held apart and yell, "AND ONE LARGE DOG," and then I point to where they went. He nods and drives off to try his hand at it.
I don't know what he must have thought if he saw our big truck advertising who we are, and then looked at all of us running around in such an assortment of outfits. Not a uniform to be had among all of us. And the secretary is the only employee actually on the clock. And she's not even wearing shoes! Yup…we're a high-quality operation, we are!
So I finally catch up to the rest of the group. They've seen the other agency vehicle and we've all decided that it is now out of our hands and belongs to them. We've spent an hour in pursuit with no luck. When I get with the other girls, I make the declaration that if the otheragency catches the dogs, it's only because we tired them out.
So after my morning of attempting to be an Animal Control Officer, I put my sandals back on and we called it a morning.
Did I mention that this was all before my morning cup of coffee?
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