In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey...

Some of my favorite callers are our crazies. These are people who call so frequently with their bizarre rantings that we know them by name. They are by turns angry, intriguing and heartbreaking. Some are harmless, and some make me concerned for the safety of their neighbors and the small domesticated animals in the area.

On graveyard shift, we get the gold standard, the creme de la creme, the pick of the litter when it comes to our 'repeat customers'. Here is a small sample of what I might hear on an average shift.

One woman calls convinced that her neighbor is torturing cats. She knows this is happening because the cats tell her. She can hear the cats speaking to her even when there are only random body parts left of them. She frequently hears cries of pain from a cat's severed ear or leg. Officers have been out to chat with this woman very frequently. She completely believes her hallucinations and suffers deep emotional anguish because she thinks no one cares that these cats are suffering such horrendous torture. I feel so sad for this woman. I love animals and I understand the empathy she has for them. I would feel helpless if someone was torturing animals near me and I was powerless to stop it, too. Sometime she goes for long stretches without calling before starting up again. I assume she goes though periods where her medications work well for her, and then she stops taking them, and hearing cats in the middle of the night again.

We also have a guy that calls every night, same time. He just wants to let us know there are low frequency voices coming from a factory in a town an hour away. He never wants to chat, never elaborates, just calls to get it on the record. He never even requests that anything is done about it. Puzzling fellow!

Lots of our crazies are angry. They call ranting and raving that so many people have done them wrong and why haven't we done anything about it? We need to get these people arrested, they killed and boiled all their family members and the police don't even care! The angries are not fun to deal with. They can be incredibly foul mouthed and vulgar and of course they cannot listen to reason. What they are rambling about are their realities.

One woman calls early in the mornings (on non emergency! She's my favorite!) and says three or four times in a sing songy voice "I love you! I love you! Thank you!" and hangs up. She's pleasant and there is more than once when she's sounded like the voice of reason when it seemed that everyone else in the world had lost their marbles.

Sometimes people are just high on drugs. These are the people who are ranting like a "normal" crazy, but talking so fast we can't understand them. These are also the people who think that bugs are crawling under their skin, etc.

Here's a good example of someone who is temporarily crazy due to drugs. Not meth, so he's not a fast talker, but wow...he's not all there. I feel bad for the dispatcher, she can't even think of what to ask them she's so flabbergasted. Its not nice to laugh at most crazies, they can't help their conditions, and its really kind of sad. But this dumbass, well laugh all you want. He deserves it!