goodreads | Answering 911 - Caroline Burau

Title: Answering 911: Life in the Hot Seat
Author: Caroline Burau
Genre: Non-fiction, memoir
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 203
Date read: February, 2010

You answer a call from a fourteen-year-old boy asking for someone to arrest his mother, who is smoking crack in their bathroom. You talk with him until the cops arrive, making sure there are no weapons around and learning that his favorite subject in school is lunch. Five minutes later, you have to deal with someone complaining about his neighbor's clarinet practice. What is it like to be on the receiving end of desperate calls for help . . . every day?

I've wanted to read this book for ages, but never seemed to be able to find it in any physical bookstores or libraries. Finally I gave up, and bought it online.

It was worth the wait. Real-life stories from less-than-common careers have always fascinated me (other books that fit those criteria: "ER Confessional" and "Kitchen Confidential"), and "Answering 911" was every bit as interesting as I'd expected it to be. I liked Caroline Burau's way of writing and appreciated that she didn't feel the need to always tie the stories neatly together or draw up a moral, as they stood nicely on their own.

One thing that quickly became very obvious to me was that this is not a job I'd be able to do. It would be utterly impossible for me to "leave work at work", and I have come to have the greatest respect for the personnel manning those phones.