Join us as Matthew Williams shares his invaluable insights and experiences from the front lines of emergency dispatch, offering a deeper understanding of the complexities and critical nature of this often-overlooked aspect of emergency services.
Matthew Williams: A Decade of Excellence in Emergency Dispatch
Matthew has dedicated over a decade of his career to the critical role of emergency dispatch, currently serving as a fire dispatcher at Skagit 911, also known as Cascade Dispatch. With eleven years of experience, Matthew has evolved from a 911 call taker trained by our host, Jennifer Darling, to a seasoned fire dispatcher. His commitment to excellence and continuous improvement in emergency response communication has significantly contributed to the safety and well-being of Skagit County residents.
In our conversation, we uncover the intricate world of emergency dispatch, the evolution of technology in the field, and the personal challenges and triumphs faced by dispatchers.
Specifically, we discuss:
The transition from traditional dispatch methods to the ProQA system and its impact on emergency response accuracy.
The challenges of adapting to new technologies and methodologies in dispatch.
The importance of building strong relationships between dispatchers and field responders for effective emergency management.
Strategies for managing the emotional toll of handling life-or-death situations over the phone.
The critical role of continuous training and the unique approach to recruitment and retention in the dispatch profession.
Matthew's initiative in creating a dispatch newsletter to foster community and share knowledge among emergency response teams.
Welcome to a duty to act with your host, Jennifer darling.. I'm sure he does every photograph where I stick my tongue out at him. He's got and I'm sure every time I screwed up. And to be fair, I used to make videos for a teaching company I taught for. I used to make these little behind the desk, one camera, you know, iPad facing me, little mini videos. And I've got all the bloopers from them and I love them. I love them. Hey Matthew, thank you for being here with me today. Matthew Williams from Cascade Dispatch. Can you introduce yourself in the context of how I know you and what it is that you do?. We've been working together now for eleven years. You trained me on how to properly take and document medical calls as a 911 dispatcher and call taker. Thank you so much for being such a beautiful teacher. I really appreciate you. And I've been a fire dispatcher now for the last six or seven years out of the eleven I've worked at 911 Skagget county. And just a small correction, it's Skadget 911. We call ourselves cascade. Not to put any correction on that, but we've had a great working relationship over the last couple of years and I think it's really developed each time that something would come to a head. I guess they're not necessarily conflict, but you've always been really receptive to me calling you after a follow up on a call so we can figure out something and it's like where do we go wrong with this? Or how can we make this better next time? And it's been for me a great working relationship.. I think that's really fantastic to hear. And I appreciate that. I don't get too many calls like that, but occasionally I get that and I have to comment just right off the bat before we go to anything else about the instant messaging.. Okay.. So I just want to let you know this is something that you're going to learn right now. And then everybody's going to learn that you work with through the podcast. If they listen, I don't know if they will or not. But just to let you know, there's this moment in every trainee's life when I have a brand new paramedic that I'm training on the ambulance, and I teach them how to instant message dispatch and I try to make sure that you're on because then it is off to the races. And so I say, okay, so this is another way you can reach out to dispatch. And here you go. So it looks like Matthew's out there, say hello, matthew, and introduce yourself. And then about 10 minutes later I'm like, you good, because the conversations just go. I'm so blown away by how you guys are fastest fingers and so responsive to us on instant messaging, and that's where the personality and all the emojis really come out.. Well, we've been asking for additional emojis for years on the instant messaging system. Unfortunately, we're limited like to a dozen. We can't really express our true inner thoughts with every smiley face or sticking tongue out emoji. But we try to get the point across to you guys.. My favorite is that the sarcastic emoji is still there and the nerd emoji is there. So those are two that we have to, but we really haven't stepped it up into the next generation of emojis.. It's very limited. We just have to be very creative in our word choice and word usage.. Yeah, that's awesome. That's really awesome. So you started off at Skadget dispatch where we were using one type of programming, and now we've switched to a different type of programming. And feel free, you can mention the names. I'm not going to remember the names myself, but you can mention the names. Of course, that's not a problem. But the old system, you used to have a field provider, it was me. In your case, it was me. A field provider come in and orient you to all of the medical conditions that people call for. Sort of a mini EMT class, a general knowledge about medicine so you could understand the words and the themes that were coming across as a call taker. But that's not going on right now. How are your new dispatchers getting oriented to medical conditions and concerns?. So back in the days of old, I guess we used a criteria based dispatcher. We call it CBD. And yes, we would have a professional come in and give us a basic eight hour course in what paramedics know over the course of, I don't know, however many years of training. So it's very condensed and it's basically quickly understanding symptoms and signs that are relayed via the phone. And we could use either like a flip chart book with about 50 different pages to rapidly go to one thing, or a quick click on our computer desktop to help navigate through and do a pre diagnosis, if you will, and get what limited information we could to the paramedics. Now we use a much more complex system called Proqa, and it is less freelance and much more streamlined, and it's very beneficial to finding the exact nature as per described by the caller. It's a little bit more time consuming, but it's not necessarily about the time. It's more about getting the best response possible, like ascertaining whether or not a patient is truly sick, needing an ALS response, or just a BLS response. And that's what it's designed for. And a truly tiered response system, we're not at that right now in Skadget County. I know the desire would eventually be to be there, but that's the system we use in place now. The training is done via digital classes and it's much more learning how to run the system with a proper diagnosis than taking the guesswork basically out of it. From the call taker's hands is primarily the reason we switch from one to the next.. Okay. Are you pleased with the innovation or is it challenging?. It's extremely challenging. I'll use my most pc terminology I can think of. It's not a very fond system by many people, myself included. I might be the head of that, but it is very effective at diagnosing things. I will give it that. It is very effective. The time consuming thing is something that I don't care for. Every system is going to have a hiccup. No system's perfect. I preferred the ability to give it into the dispatcher's hand. As to hearing what's going on. As far as like an example might be ago breathing. And what we did in our training with the CBD was we spent a considerable amount of time by say like a half hour understanding what agol breathing was, what it sounded like having somebody get the phone next to the person so we could hear it as a call taker. Whereas now it's specifically computer based, where you ask, are they conscious? If it's no, are they breathing? No. Then we have to ask, are they breathing normally? And so to me, even though it's only a few extra seconds, I still rely, and I'll get docked for it at times. I know, and I get it, but I rely on that old school instinct of, this is what I know I hear to create a higher response dispatch sooner. I hope I answered your question. You did.. No, you absolutely did that. And that's a great example because ago respiration is something that you can hear in the background if it's going on. If you do that, and if the program that you're operating doesn't allow for that question, then you wonder about dispatchers who didn't have your background, who are just coming from graduating high school, graduating college thinking, wow, this is something I think I'm interested that I want to do. I have no medical background, doesn't say anything about potential, but without getting some of the medical information, we always wonder. And this is actually something that comes up with my coworkers a fair amount. They mistakenly believe that dispatchers are trained EMTs or trained caregivers of some sort, that they've got a background. So here's a question for you. You have your background that you came in with your initial CBD training, you got medical training, then you've done the online stuff with the proqa. Proqa. Do you think that the dispatchers that have their EMT training because there's a couple. Do you think that they're at a disadvantage because they know too much?. Only in a disadvantage in a sense that people like myself are very unwilling to waver in my methodology. It's not to say that it doesn't work. There are ways to make it work. An example also is that I believe that we just finished or we're in the midst of a training. Proqa is coming out with an update that I believe allows that agol respirations or potential for it. I can't remember off the top of my head what the exact wording was, but something that's great about the digital form that we're using is it can constantly be given segues and loops in it that we can say, we want to remove this. We need to add that. And that goes through the medical directors passageway as well. But it can be a hindrance because we're so rooted in the ways that we used to do things opposed to a more effective way. I am apparently now in the realm of the crotchety old dispatcher because I'm like number five or something now out of 25 dispatchers, so I am in no way the most senior person there, but I'm no spring chicken at all. So I'm very set in my ways, unfortunately.. And how's the longevity in dispatch positions? I kind of know the answer to this myself, but I'd love to hear the insider point of view. We see current generations or people that are moving to different, not just to different jobs, but also different careers and different avenues. How long do you think dispatchers are lasting these days compared to maybe what it was when you first started?. It's a constant change and a constant flux. Unfortunately, I don't think there's a solid answer. I'm sure you can see the same thing in your own area where you have those people who will stick there and make it a good career for anywhere from five to 15 years and make a good plug at it. And then there's people who will do it for seven months, get their certification, and then realize, this is not for me. And then there's those golden few who stick it out for an internal career of 25 years or so. Right now we have one dispatcher who next week is going to have been worked with dispatch for 29 years. Wow, she's our most senior person. But over the last calendar year and a half, we have lost between just three people. I want to say we've lost 85 years of dispatching experience in just three people in a year and a half. So not necessarily a changing of the guard, but the way technology expands and changes so quickly, having the ability to continuously update the way you handle things and take on new changes becomes more difficult the longer you've been around. I hate change. I've only been there for eleven years. I'm under 40, and I still am very frustrated in my ability to keep up with how things are changing. So the way those things manifest and compound themselves just creates more strain. I would say definitely the younger somebody is when they come in and start, the easier it is hopefully going to be for them to adapt and maintain it. There's a lot to say about teaching old dog new tricks, not saying there's age specific for people who can and cannot do the job. It just tends to be numbers will show easier for younger people to pick up quicker and be able to multitask better at a high paced speed. Getting back to the IM conversation, where I'll have an instant message conversation with you on the computer, somebody across the room taking a phone call and dispatching a call at the same time and just quickly hopping back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and after 5 minutes, my brain shot, yeah, that's.. Got to be pretty complex. And when we're messaging you, obviously we're not driving down. I'm not driving and messaging at the same time, but I'm driving and I'm telling my partner, like, oh, tell them this. Oh, tell them that. And it cracks me up because again, the new people, as I'm training them, they tend to take to it really well. And so over the years, it started off as this, like, check out what happens when you start instant messaging dispatch and you see all the emojis and things and now they are going that way for more common communication. Instead of rare occasional things, they're kind of going that, and I think that's really interesting. My impression is I've been in the dispatch center several times. You guys have been busy, of course, but that you're just screens all the time. I mean, it's all screens all the time. How does that affect you in your off time? Do you just completely avoid screens or do you seek them out because you're so comfortable in that communication?. It honestly depends. When I'm out of work, I hate my phone. I don't want my phone anywhere near me. Might be because I'm always on the phone when I'm at work, when I'm sitting down in my console. Just to give you guys an idea, I have eight monitors in front of my face. I have one for my radio, one for my email and outside communication. I have four dispatch screens and two monitors for my phone, specifically a map and another one of the phone itself. And within those I have instant message windows. I have my call windows, my call taking windows, the windows for the calls I'm sending out, ones that are already up and running. And as far as outside of work, for me, it depends on the type of day. Sometimes if I'm at home, I will just have a YouTube background channel with jazz on, and that's my only noise. Other times, I have no screens on and I'll just sit in silence because I don't want to hear anything, I don't want to see anything. I'm overstimulated. I mentioned earlier, before we started the conversation, I have a three and a five year old. So the less stimulation the better. Yeah, but it's not necessarily always go go. It's hell or high water. At dispatch for fire, it can be fire and EMS dispatching. I can have no calls on my screen for the entire county. We dispatch for 25 districts in all medical, and then in a matter of 2 minutes, I will need to dispatch three different calls, one of them being a structure fire. I'll have three different radio frequencies going, and that all happens in a blink of an eye. And then I'm busy for 20 minutes and then it's a lull. So it all depends on how busy I am. Some nights on a graveyard shift, I can go 5 hours without dispatching a single call. Other times during the day, like a winter storm, I wasn't there, thankfully.. Oh my heavens.. The other week we had three people dispatching on three different fire frequencies, handling three different frequencies, and they handled 40 calls in an hour. Or no, 40 calls in 4 hours, which is insane because on average, we're probably doing ten calls an hour or not ten calls ten calls every 4 hours or something like that. And it just gets very overwhelming very fast. And outside of work, you really don't want to see those screens or. Because we are so efficient at multitasking, it's not uncommon for myself, and I've talked with other coworkers who do the same thing. Well, they'll be playing tic tac toe or something on their phone and have music in the background and then have an action movie on. On the tv, and all these things are going on, and they're just briefly paying attention to everything, but they also know everything that's going on because we're so adept at having that multifaceted skill going on at all times.. All right, to what degree do you think you've developed that, or to what degree do you think you brought that to this job with you?. For me, it's something I had to develop. I've seen trainees take to the job lickety split, get signed off in three and a half to four months, and they are just so adept and capable of multitasking, functioning at a high level at all times. Myself, I took about eight and a half months to get signed off just because my learning style is very different. I'm very straightforward. I am black and white, and it just creates a lot more focus for me to learn how to adapt in a gray world. An example would be for if somebody told me that there was a car running immediately. That evokes two different thoughts is like, okay, is that fleeing, or is it idling? Running. It's two different things depending on the context. Whereas I had to train myself to not just take those words, but actively think about them and what they meant in context. Took a lot more time and energy. I was on a performance plan at one point while I was call taking because I was basically not up to snuff. I wasn't performing up to standards. Thankfully, I was able to persevere through that, and I'm still there. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.. Yay. Good job.. Oh, thank you. Gold guitar for me.. Perfect. That's an interesting aspect of your job. In compared to my job, there are numbers that we track in my job. For example, for my trainees, we want to know how many times they're attempting ivs and how many times they're successfully getting ivs. And we want to know response time to calls. A lot of it is sort of anecdotal. Some of it is very digital, easy to count up, and others are very anecdotal. But dispatch there's all kinds of numbers that are tracked with you guys. Can you tell us about some of the ways that you're tracked in your performance?. Some of the easiest things to say are we have a national standard of call entry time that we have to adhere to. So that's going to be like our primary focus and goal. And then you have a percentage of getting the address correct, getting the reporting party's name correct, documenting officer and scene security safety is a high priority, and I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it's basically you need to pass 80% of your calls, 80% of the time, somewhere in that region. And we have like, week by week by week by week standards that we want to track progression. And through the months of your call, take training before you get to call, take on your own for a little bit. And then you go into dispatching a console law or fire, and then you have to do both at the same time. So we don't want to overwhelm you and drown you, but we are expecting to continuously add to your load as we go. And we have lots of schematics, excel sheets, word documents, all these different things that we adhere to to try to monitor and keep track of your progress. And basically, as long as you're still progressing, you keep moving along. If there's backslide, then you have a performance plan and I guess a second chance at life at bringing those standards back up. But then if you're not cutting it, it's a safety issue. Unfortunately, we can't keep you type of thing.. Right. Okay. All right. Skadget's dispatch center staffs. How many dispatchers on an evening? Hang on, little breath. Here, let me take a sip of water, too.. That sandwich is settling quite nicely.. The last recording I did with the police officer, both of our stomachs were just, we're both leaning away. Okay. On an average day, not particularly peak hours or anything, but what's the staffing like?. At dispatch, we have staffing levels depending on different hours and we have different blocks. So in the early morning, we are required to have six personnel staffing midday or early midday. It'll go up to seven, and then late or afternoon to late midday. We have eight personnel that are required on the floor. And then it depends on if it's a Friday or Saturday evening when life happens. Life is more busy. Just statistically, we'll have up to seven or up to eight people again Friday evening until two in the morning, and then it'll drop back down to six personnel again, from two to six in the morning, people aren't calling. There's no reason to have that amount of staff on the floor. And then for events, we might have nine personnel required, or we upstaff for, like, traffic enforcement issues or traffic enforcement. My brain just took a big dump. I'm sorry.. That's okay.. When we have upstaffing, we will bring in extra personnel. If there's like a traffic emphasis or something like that, or some sort of event where we need to monitor an extra radio frequency, we'll have that accounted for. But then also, that's just our requirements right now. I want to say that staffing wise, we have, like 24 or 25 out of 35 accounted for, so about two thirds. And then we have three trainees. We have one person who's going to be coming back IPT after maternity leave. So right there, if you just go with the numbers, 24 dispatchers. Okay, we have graves and days. And then alternating a's and B's shifts split down the middle. That's four portions of six. Okay, so there you can immediately see that we obviously don't have the staffing numbers for that. And then if somebody calls out sick or if somebody's early on vacation or something like that, we have to fill those slots. Sometimes a supervisor who does not count as one of the numbers because they have supervisorial duties, they can drop into the counts to help with those numbers. But that's not necessarily always the case.. How do you guys do at recruitment? How are you finding your people?. Honestly, I have not been on an interview board in my time there, so I'm not really familiar with the interview process or the hiring process. I know our admin does a pretty good job at reaching out in different avenues. Social media, just newspaper, different ways of trying to get the word out. Say, hey, we're hiring. And depending during the COVID years, we didn't get that many people. Now our numbers are starting to go back up. And you can't quote me on these numbers, but an example is like, we might get anywhere from 50 to 100 applicants per hiring process. And let's say that we take 20 of those to the oral boards out of. Sorry. So let's say, like, 75 of those hundred actually fill out the packet correctly. It's like, okay, so of these 75, here are the most qualified that we can see. We'll take these 20 to the oral boards. Okay, we have oral boards. And then we'll say, okay, let's take these ten forward for a polygraph test background. And then from those ten say, okay, these are the ones who are most likely to succeed here. They proved most the highest aptitude for the multitasking task. We have them do sit down in a computer and do some things. So we take these four and do a final interview with our director and then like an offering of job, and then they come into the academy.. Okay.. And so that hiring process expedited can take like a month and a half. Okay. Standardly, I don't want to say it would like take two to two and a half months to make sure that all that's organized. Once they get to the academy, we do all of our training on site. And so now we are down to. From, let's say, 100. We're down to four. We can probably expect one of those four to pass. Wow. Either two or four or one out of four to pass successfully and be retained as a dispatcher after four to six months of training.. Yeah, I mean, it really does come down to sort of an elite group of people that make it all the way through because it's quite a gauntlet. I mean, the polygraph is, of course, because they do law enforcement dispatching and they have a lot of information into people. I mean, there's a lot of protected information that you automatically have access to as a dispatcher. And obviously we want people of good character. We don't do polygraphs in the fire service in general, we do background checks, but polygraph is not usually part of it. There are things like typing tests, keyboarding, which we don't get, thank God, but the gauntlet to get there. But the benefits of it with dispatch especially, is that you take people with no background whatsoever and turn them into dispatchers.. Correct.. And so often with the fire departments, we're really looking for people that have EMT training to start with, possibly firefighter one or firefighter level two as a background. Mount Vernon still sends people to the academy, but that's not typical in a community like Skagget county with all the volunteers part paid, the smaller departments. So dispatch, I think, has always been very intriguing. That that is the model is you don't go to college and get this, you don't go to a trade school and get this. It's all on the job training. But as a result, you invest a lot of time into candidates that are unproven for their background.. Yeah. And that's unfortunately, you can only trust and take so much what they give you. Much like our callers, we can only take their word at what they're giving us in somebody's application we can say, oh, they look like a great candidate. Let's push them forward, only to find out after a background check, hey, this person has a felony and they lied. Okay, I'm sorry. You would have been great, but no, thank you. Goodbye.. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think if a person is upfront about something like that, they could engage? I mean, is it one of those things where it's an automatic stopper to getting a job if you've got something in your background, as long as you.. Disclose appropriately, it all depends. I don't know our policies offhand. I think a felony would automatically evict you from the process. But like having a misdemeanor, speeding tickets, things like that.. Not usually a stopper.. Not usually a stopper. I mean, as long as you're honest and upfront, that's part of the polygraph, is like, are you able to be truthful with the information that you are given? We're looking for honest, hard workers. And, yeah, you need a high school degree or GED equivalent, and that's it. Yeah, but as long as you're a hard worker able to multitask at a high level of efficiency for extended periods of time, we have a spot for you.. There you go. And at Skadget, as an example, of course, dispatch organizations run things differently all over, just like fire and EMS and law enforcement and so on. But at Skadget, do you start off as a call taker or you start off dispatching law? Which one do you start off with?. For us, you start off as a call taker.. Okay.. So basically we build layers upon your foundation. When you come in. You start off, obviously, policies and procedures the first two days, and learning how to be a good kid. Basically after that you start learning the CAD system, which is computer aided dispatch. So you learn how to run the computers, how the computers work, how to navigate them. You learn geography of the county and then basic things like that for the first week, week and a half. And then after that, you learn how to expeditiously over the next two to three weeks, process through calls. So you might have three weeks before you actually start working on the floor. You start your academy out in a separate room. But during that time, we also have it set up where the trainee also comes and sits on the floor for 2 hours every day to observe. One of my good friends not working in dispatch gave a quote that I love to use is more is caught than taught. And I think it goes above and beyond to have somebody sit with us and see how things are done so they can start using and implementing those. And they don't sit with one person every time they come out to the floor, just during observation time, we make sure to have them sit with different people, because everybody processes things differently and does things a different way. Their screens are set up differently. It goes through the same process as far as, like, entering a call, but how you get to that, there's no universal way. Yes, we have to start with the call nature, the call priority code. If it's a high priority, low priority, and the address. But your vernacular can be different, and so everybody can choose different ways of what they want to take and glean from different people that they're observing from.. That's probably really beneficial, too, because since every call is different that comes in and every caller can be at varying levels of distress or competence in an emergency. I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about what it's like to be talking to someone and have to tell them it's time to start CPR. What is that process like for you folks?. It's very cut and dry. Matter of fact, you can say, okay, if they're not conscious and they're not breathing, we need to start CPR. And you go from a sense of empathy, is what we're taught from the very beginning, is you need to be empathetic, you need to relate, create that rapport so you can sometimes get that information. But for me, it's become just so innate that I start. It's like, okay, we need to get CPR. Here's what I need you to do. And for me, as a fire dispatcher, it's step one, step two, step three, step four. These are the next things coming up. And being a black and white person, I rock at this. I can just say, okay, this is what I need from you. This is what I need from you. Next. This is what I need from you now. And just keep going through it. And it's very mechanical in a sense. And what you learn as a dispatcher call taker is sometimes we just need to think for the caller because they're in an emotional state of distress. They can't think straight. We need to tell them what to do because they are grappling with a scenario that has torn their world asunder for lack of better words. And they are not necessarily in their right minds to make the right decisions or to think outside the box about what needs to happen. An example for if we need to do CPR and somebody's on the bed, be like, I can't do CPR. He's on the bed. Okay, we need to get him to the floor. He's too big. He's twice my size. So we start problem solving for them. I need you to push or roll him. Proqa has an option for this. It's like, is he on the bedsheet? Grab the bedsheet and pull him to the floor. Pull him free from that. So we start troubleshooting for them and problem solving, giving them options like, do this, do this, do this. And it's very mechanical, like I said. And sometimes it can be very emotional in the effect that you might have to be walking somebody through CPR on their infant on a five year old. But as you are giving instructions, that's your sole focus, though, is getting them to do the correct process and the correct procedure. And that is our sole focus at that time. What will happen on the dispatch floor is if we're taking a CPR call for somebody who has a cardiac arrest, somebody else is picking up our console for us. If I'm dispatching Mount Vernon PD and I answer the phone and I'm taking CPR call, either the lead or another dispatcher will shout out to the room, I've got console three, or I've got Mount Vernon law. So now, as a call taker, this is my undivided attention. I am trying to get as much help and focus with you as I can. You are my only responsibility in the world right now. And so it's a great team effort in that aspect, but also in the sense that we become hyper fixated on. This is my only job right now, is to make sure that you are doing adequate compressions or if at least getting them to the floor so we can do a breathing diagnostic, because sometimes somebody will fall between the bed and the wall, and all they need to do is get them back flat on the floor so their neck isn't compressed or anything like that, so they can actually get an open airway.. Okay. How do you think, speaking in a broad strokes about the dispatchers that you've known, how do you think you guys are set up for managing the emotional stress, the secondary trauma that happens from helping people when they're at their. Having their worst day of their lives.. Really well, yeah, we can take advantage of Cism, critical incident stress management, and I don't know if you've ever been privy to go to any of those CIs meeting.. Yeah, I've been in incidents, I've been in debriefings and things.. Okay. Yeah. So we have privy to go to the debriefings and follow up along with those on scene. Because, as people say, we are the first 1st responders. We're the ones answering the phone. We don't know the outcome. We don't always know the outcome. We aren't there. We can't physically help. All we have is our voice. And to be able to process that externally with a group of people who also experience the same incident is extremely helpful. We are always more than welcome to step away from our console if we need a minute to gather ourselves, take a ten minute walk, breathe before we come back and take over our console again. Because it was emotionally trying. Because let's just say for a moment that I have a three and a five year old. If I took a phone call and I had to walk somebody through CPR on their toddler, or it's going to be a SIDS incident, I might be able to detach myself and see, yep, I'm good. Depending on the day. Maybe I had a bad night's sleep, and it just made me really emotionally weary. Somebody will take my console for me and let me step outside, get some fresh air, collect myself, come back in and continue. Because as a call taker, you don't know what's coming through next. It might be somebody locked out of their call, their car. The next call after that is somebody needing CPR. The call after that is somebody who found a dog. And then the call after that, somebody found a vehicle flipped over in the ditch off Conway frontage. You have no idea what's coming through. And so if you're not mentally prepared for the next call, you're not going to be of any use to either the citizen, which is a safety issue, or your team.. Yeah.. And it hearkens me back to, we have a trainee right now who's going through her dispatch sign off or working on getting signed off for dispatching. She's already signed off as a call taker. I want to say in the last month and a half to two months, she has taken three infant CPR calls.. Oh, my goodness.. She has, like, a two year old and is pregnant. So you can imagine, like, she, after the most recent one is like, I need a break. And everyone's like, take as long as you need. Take as long as you need. Because it's just the nature of the job. You're going to need a moment because like you said, people are going to call us on their worst day, and we have to be able to help them to the best of our abilities and just don't know when that's actually going to happen.. You may remember this because I'm pretty sure I told this just to all the dispatch groups when I first met you back in the day when I was teaching that. But I got involved in teaching dispatch basically because I had a really bad call. It was an infant drowning. It was an 18 month old or so who drowned in a bathtub at home. And we were dispatched. I had never given a lot of thought to dispatch and what you folks dealt with and how you dealt with it. What strikes me is this profound lack of closure that you get in dispatch, that we have more. We get more closure in the field. So this particular call was an 18 month old who drowned. It was a very emotionally charged scene, not simply family love, sad child emotion, not just that, but also there was a strong thread, a component of anger, because there were some family friends that were experiencing their emotions in a very aggressive way. And so we actually had to be protected by law enforcement while we underwent attempting to resuscitate this child that we knew was not going to survive based on downtime. Lot, a lot of things. Of course, we tried everything. This was an evolving understanding. But we got to the hospital with the patient, and I do not recall what prompted me other than this was such a strange call where we had to request law enforcement for a CPR call and an infant. And I contacted dispatch, and I spoke with Faye, who, of course, has retired now for many years. And I spoke with Faye, and I said, this is what happened. This is why we needed law. And I just want to let you know that everything that could have been done was done, but there was nothing that could have been done. And that was it. And I had this conversation with Faye, and then several days later, there was a CISD, and having been in my career for 15 or so years, up until then in a different place, and we all come into things with our own baggage and what our experiences were. But I was sort of a CISD disbeliever. I was just like, that's not for me. This is not how I process. But it was impressed on me that I should really go. And both my partner and I went, and when I was there. And part of the process is you go around the room and you talk about your own experience with the call. Faye was the dispatcher, and Faye was there. And Faye said how much it meant to her that she got closure on this call, that she got the full picture on this call. And that's when this light bulb kind of went on over my head or I was smacked upside by a hammer or something like that. But I was like, oh, sometimes you do this not for yourself, but for other people. And so since that time, I've been a proponent, and I've also grown to understand my need for it, but I've been a proponent for it, and I've been a proponent for letting dispatch know, like, hey, this is what happened. Because you don't get the closure that we get.. Exactly. And that's something that, as I became a fire dispatcher, I was a call taker for four years, and I was the only one who did that as just a call taker. I'll just let you know that I failed law dispatching twice. So those who don't dispatch law, dispatch fire.. That's how that goes.. But I had my fair share of things, and I've got one that still sticks out in my head of a wife calling in, and I can still hear her words crystal clear in my head ten years later on Thanksgiving night. And it's something that's never going to go away because I can hear that. But getting closure and getting follow up on that was extremely valuable. As to understanding, like, yeah, that there was nothing that could happen. And since becoming a fire dispatcher, I noticed that law dispatchers had great rapport with their officers. Officers always came by the dispatch center, sending ims, cackling, laughing and whatnot. And there was nothing like that for the other fire dispatchers that I started working with. When I got signed off, there was no rapport. It was very cut and dry. You do your job, go do what you do, and then you'll clear. But jealously, I guess I wanted that relationship. I wanted that working relationship. So I start, I don't know if you'd notice that at all, but I would start calling constantly after I would dispatch somebody say, hey, how did this go? How can I do this better? Or it's an instant message and say, hey, question on this. How can this be better? And I feel like I've grown quite a sizable number of friends now in the fire community and ems, and they are very willing to call back to dispatch and follow up specifically with the call taker for a medical issue or an example recently, maybe not recently, but months ago, a call taker had somebody who had fallen behind a door, and they couldn't get the door open. And I don't think they made it. The patient didn't survive. But having the med crew call back in and talk with the call taker and say, hey, look, here's the situation. This guy was 300 pounds. He fell in the bathroom behind the door. His wife is 100 pounds. There's no way she was going to get that door open. And giving that closure, like you said, and understanding you did all you could do has been great. And so I continuously try to, in those circumstances, reach out to you guys as the first person on scene, either the responding engine or the med crew. It's like, hey, can you just call dispatch at your leisure so we can follow up on this so we understand getting that closure and understanding that we're not just moving on to the next call and it's not just another number in our bank.. Yeah, I think that's ideal. Well, just to let you know that you are the stuff of legend at Mount Vernon fire. They know. And now I want to be very kind. There are many wonderful dispatchers at Skadgy dispatch. I just want to make that very clear. But it's usually, is it four to one, female to male? Is that about the ratio?. We'll go three to one or four to one? I don't know. I'd have to do some quick math.. Female voices outnumber male voices just right off the bat, which means male voices are a little bit more distinctive. So not to send anybody else down, but just to let you know, but people are like, oh, Matthew's on. They just, uh. And some of my trainees now, they look, when we click on the instant message, we get all of the telecommunicators, we get all of the ones that are on duty, have a little green dot, and then they'll like, that's you. They know who dispatched them, and it's not necessarily true with everybody else, so you are doing it right, and that's a big part of why I asked you to be here. I had hoped for Tiffany and you to come on together, and I think Tiffany is really happy to be a behind the scenes person and do those sort of things. So I'm glad that you stepped up and did this.. Yeah, she very much of like, yeah, no, you go, good.. I'm good. Yeah. I think when I approached her and said, will you be on my podcast? She's like, oh, no, that's a very good impression of her. I taught with her for so long.. Can I get a click? I need to go to the bathroom.. Yeah, absolutely. So tell me, are there any field providers that come across other than me? You've met me, so then you know who I am. But are there any field providers that come across in particularly memorable for you?. I know exactly where you're going with this? I have a particular favorite, and it's not because of their abilities. It's specifically based on mannerisms. And definitely Cody with Mount Vernon fire, there is, I feel, a great professional give and take in the way we handle ourselves and conduct ourselves with our banter. But it's also been relayed to me by other personnel that they love listening to us.. Do you have any particular call that you can imagine with Cody? I don't know if you were on the other day when there was the person that drove into the river, were you a part of that call? Because Cody was all over the radio on that one?. No, I was not on duty for that one. The one that probably sticks out best to me was we had a report of a structure fire potential. And I instructed the call taker to put it as an invest instead. Because they were reviewing it from multiple blocks away. And they thought it was a chimney fire. Flames coming from a chimney from somewhere far and away. And we were looking at the map on the phone. And it wasn't really making sense what they were seeing across a huge plot of land on the far side at a rough intersection. So they went out to investigate. I gave where the RP was. Sorry. The reporting party was calling from their suspected location of this chimney fire. And they drove around and around and around. Couldn't find anything. We backtracked and took, like, a pretend line of sight type thing. And noticed that the person happened to be looking directly across a cemetery. So given the line of sight, it happened to be right by the crematorium. And Cody said that he would go and investigate and see if they were doing normal operations at that time. Yeah, I can't remember the exact verbiage, but he confirmed that everything is functioning as normal. And it looks like this is another incendiary incident or something akin to that. Very creative.. With his word choice, I am pretty sure I've heard him tell the story from his point of view as well. So, yeah, I would say that it's noticeable. When the two of you are talking to each other, we identify that little phenomenon. And I would say also using total radio etiquette, as you're supposed to. But creative adjectives and inflection in your voices.. Inflection is sometimes all I can do to stress the pain in having to send you guys to a call. I know you don't need to go to or providing details that might not necessarily be necessary, but I still feel they should be put into the radio verse.. Yeah, it should be heard out there. All right. So one of my favorite things about dispatch that is probably cringeworthy on your side of things, and I'm just going to say it is the typographical errors that come up in the mobile data terminal. So we get both voice and we get typed in. And I understand because I spent a lot of years teaching with dispatch, so I know that you have to hear words go into your head and make them come out on the keyboard immediately. So the call takers I know are trying, but I think my favorite one was the mythrocardial infarction. Mythrocardial infraction. The mythrocardial infraction that I was dispatched to. And just every now and then, good ones like that.. Yeah, I can definitely attest to spelling is hard, especially when it goes into the computer database, and then I'm not medically trained. So when they give me a word, I'm like, I have no idea what that is. So I'm just going to say difficulty breathing, and then that's all you're going to get. Yeah, another one I very vividly remember because somebody took a recording event on their phone. I sent med 119 down to Conway once for a low oxygenation levels. Oxygeneration, because I was trying to say oxygen saturation. And for some reason they just became one word.. Yeah, but we definitely know what you're talking about there. I do. I have these soft spots in my heart for every now and then. I'm like, oh, that's cute.. That's so cute. Another person I frequently will mess with is Glenn Gardner from cedar woolly, and I will get an atta boy from him every now and then on instant messenger when I pronounce a word correctly. Or he'll do it phonetically on instant messenger and like over four syllables, send me one line at a time, is how it's pronounced. Is it what he'll say? It's like, fine, whatever, maybe next time he's like, star for trying. Yeah. We are not medically trained. I have no idea what this word is. Case in point, the other day I took a call from one of the urgent carers and the caller just said, I have a strider. And I'm like, who is strider? What is the importance of this? And they reiterated, I have a strider. It's like, well, WHOOP dee frickin'do. What do you want me to do about it? Do you need fire, law or med?. Yeah, exactly.. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.. I do. But interestingly, we could go to the Lord of the Rings. Or we could go to somebody on a horse, or we could go to the audible lung sound.. Yeah, no, I definitely thought like, bilbo Baggins, your sword is mine. And I'm thinking, this nurse is an idiot, because, again, you can laugh all you want.. I snorted two times.. And this is so funny because I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. And I have to stress to them, and we all do this, we will stay point blank. I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you give that to me in plain English? It's like, well, they're having striatric whatever it is, breathing. I was like, well, what does that mean? Is it rapid? Is it slow? You still need to use a different word for me, lady. I don't know what you're saying. And then she got mad at me. She had the nerve and the audacity to get mad at me for someone who wanted clarification.. Now, actually, that's a really good point. In dispatch, you all have to train for a lot more hostility than we have to deal with. On the ambulance, we deal with hostility. So of course, obviously law, the most hostility and then ems, hostility, fire, almost no hostility. It's really rare that there's hostility on the fire side of things. But at dispatch, you have to deal with a lot of hostility. You have to deal with crazy people.. We have a lot of verbal abuse.. Yeah. So tell me a little bit more about that. And how does it work to get, how do you get prepared for that?. There is no preparing for crazy.. I'm writing that down.. Good.. Okay.. Yeah. You can't prepare for crazy. You can only anticipate. And there's times where if there's truly no emergency and they're just in a, I can't think of any other word but like a female dog in heat. That's how they're being toward us and just yelling and cursing. It's like, okay, if there's really no medical or law enforcement emergency, there's not much I can do. Yes, we are boiling inside and we want to curse at them, but we can't because professionalism, all that stuff, and then trying our best to help them out. And occasionally we'll get callers who repeatedly just call and yell and jerk at us. I can think of a handful of times over my tenure here that we've actually had to enter a call for phone harassment because they're abusing the privilege of 911 services. And I don't know if they've gotten served with a restraining order, but they're basically told by law you cannot call unless there's an emergency or you're going to get in trouble. It very rarely comes to that, but it does in terms of dealing with it. You understand frequent flyers. We have those, and we learn how to deal with them with specific verbs or words to calm them. And we're not supposed to build rapport with callers and treat every incident as a new one. But you also understand that they're really not giving an issue. They just need to vent. Sometimes they just need to vent. Sometimes they actually have a complaint, and that's where you take it and try to expeditiously process it as much as you can. And we receive all sorts of vague or vulgar threats, just like the onslaught of harassment and things we don't need to hear. But I have one that's very near and dear to my heart that I actually received a very horrendous threat to me. And I say this with all sarcasm, by the way. Friday night, a caller threatened to take away my football watching rights.. Shocking. The Super bowl is coming.. I know. That's what the other dispatchers thought. It's like, how dare she?. How?. I've never been told that before. It's like, okay, thanks, mom.. Yeah, you're grounded. No screens for.. Effectively got grounded by my caller.. Oh, my gosh.. But that's definitely on the lighter side. And we can laugh at that, but there's definitely other ones that can be emotionally triggering for people. It's a variance that you can't account for.. I'm sure. There's this moment where you have to put up with a lot more than maybe we do on the ambulance or even law does while you're waiting to determine, is this real or is this behavioral? Is this a person who's actually being chased and in need? For example, yesterday, the gentleman whose car was in the river was screaming to dispatch that he wanted the FBI to come. Now, there's a moment where a person says, I need help. I need FBI. And then there's a moment where the person says, my car. I can't drive my car out of the river. I need the FBI. So you have to give that story some time to evolve. Whereas we have at least the visual cues.. Yeah, you definitely get that pause. Wait a minute. And then give me 20 seconds while I research your phone numbers. Like, I see who you are. You've called before on the same thing two days ago. Interesting. Okay. But in the heat of the moment, you're starting a call because you have to take the caller's word for it. We can't see what's going on. And so you start processing the call. Processing the call. And it may be right away that you recognize this doesn't make sense. Let me use my intuition and double check something. You're not even plotting on my phone in that same street. But other times we will take a burglary in progress and sounds legit. Sounds real. Person is hushed on the phone. They get there and the officers find the person sitting on their front porch. And they're having a dementia moment.. Yeah.. And you don't realize that until after the fact. So it definitely varies call by call. But the best thing, like you said, you get to see all this stuff. You have to remain stoic the whole time, behind the scenes, behind the phone, the headset. You have no idea what kind of gestures we're making or faces we're contorting.. Sarcastic emoji.. Sarcastic emoji. Left, right, center, up and down.. Okay. I have these moments when I'm making my telephone call into the emergency department. We use the cell phone to call ahead to the emergency department that we're bringing in a patient. And that phone call most commonly takes place 3ft from the patient's face. Like the patient's ears, they're right. There's line of sight. I'm sitting right beside them. I'm talking with a cell phone on my ear.. I do not injure you.. And that's a really hard phone call to make sometimes because you want to tell them something very pointed about the patient, you want to help them understand which special room to have available, such as the psych room or the crash room, the cardiac arrest room and so on. And sometimes you're just trying to characterize the patient as being appropriate to go to the waiting room. And there's, of course, no fibbing, but you have to have that conversation right in front of them. And the hard part sometimes is not coming up with the language at that moment. The hard part is dealing with the nurse on the other end of the phone going like, he did what? And you're just like, yes, you heard me, and we'll be there in 2 minutes. That's a unique facet. But in dispatch, you're actually more likely to get sued than we are in the field. Police, sorry, ems and fire far less likely. And again, it's sort of that abuse level. Dispatchers and law enforcement are much more likely to be sued than ems, and fire is the least likely to be sued. What kind of safeguards do you have to have? How do you have to plan for, what kind of continuing education do you guys have to do for that?. We do continuing ed variances from call taking processes, dispatch processes all the time. We have to do some every month. But the blanket thing we do is, I'm sure you remember the incident out on Fidelgo island. For those of you who don't know, there was a. I don't know how to politely put this, but an incident where somebody passed away after a unfortunate altercation and then there were promises of services about somebody being en route. There is a Washington state law now about promises service. So how we handle that is we are never allowed for the safety and sanctity of potentially being sued is we are never allowed to promise service. We cannot say somebody's en route. We cannot say somebody is coming. We cannot say anything is in progress. What we can say is my partner will be notifying help. We will let the correct authorities know. We will pass this information along. I have heard you. Those are things we can say. We can say what will happen or what is happening as far as processes, but we can never ever provide an ETA at all. We cannot provide any idea of a promise of service and an expectation from our reporting parties because that is a level of not comfort, but expectation that they are now realizing. And if we break that promise as first responders and a public entity, that's where liabilities start happening. So I don't know if this was, what, 13 years ago about.. Yeah, it was during the time when I was teaching.. Okay.. But, yeah, that's about that time.. So since then we get people very agitated. Well, where are they? My partner is advising help. How long are they going to be here? I can't give you that information. Well, why not? I'm not legally allowed to say. What I can tell you is we are advising help because once you make that connection and they're expecting like, well, the fire department is two blocks away, doesn't mean that ambulance is there right now. They might be on the other side of town. They might get stuck by a train that has to cross in front of them. So you start taking into all these considerations. We cannot provide any promise of service or etas to that extent. We can just make very blanket statements of, we are passing this along. I have heard your request and what.. You'Ve cited is an incident that happened for some context for those who aren't familiar with our area here. It's a rural area and it's supported by BLS. First responders that are backed up by 911 ALS, sorry, not nine one, but paid ALS that remotely located as a result. Right. It's rural, so there's a local fire department relatively close. But if there's nobody on that fire department, if there's nobody on duty that night, if they're on another call, then they're not going to get first responders.. Especially if it's a volunteer department, which this one happened to be.. This one happened to be. And then the EMS service at that time especially. But it was four ambulances covering a very large area. And if you're on another call, there's yet another delay. So everything can be orchestrated, organized, planned for the very best of circumstances where nobody ever waits more than 7 minutes for a call. Urban and 12 minutes, rural and wilderness, 30 minutes or whatever those numbers are. But if the crews are not available, they're not available. And of course, we deal with that, with staffing, we deal with that. Sick calls and multi agencies involved in a single incident trying to get it under control. But what's also interesting to me is you're citing a very specific case that happened in Skaggett county. And that law, that rule that you're talking about doesn't actually cover the whole country. Telecommunication is done differently across the country and they may make promises or they may have more on the fly information about, I'm watching the little dot, that's your ambulance that's headed to your house. But then what happens? That ambulance goes off the road, gets misdirected.. Exactly. Those are just things that even further support Washington state's decision to go away from that promise of service is as you start looking at more and more details, like your med crew the other day during the ice storm that slid off the road when they went to go help a patient and we had to call for another ambulance, which had to come from another city because all of a sudden this one is now MIA because it's icy, slid off the road, by the way, it was a complete accident. Just letting you all know that there's nothing they could have, could have done. But instances like that, that's a delay in the service. And so that's why we don't give those promises at all.. Yeah. And I think it's an interesting aspect that at dispatch, because of the way you're tracked for numbers, because of the way you are the first 1st responders, and because your world is so tight to that one phone link, that's the only connection that they have with you, that this is a real risk that we get a lot more forgiveness if we do slide off the road and when we arrive or when we have difficulty navigating, something goes on. It's just a very different world that we live in. Even though we're all doing the same thing, we're all trying to help people. I love that you called yourself the first 1st responders. I'm going to have a coroner on so I can have the last first responder.. That's cool.. Isn't that cool? I worked with some of the coroners out of Snohomish county and they said, well, we always identify ourselves as the last first responder. And I'm like, that's brilliant.. That is brilliant. I've never heard of that before, but it's true. Them themselves, they, along with our field support officers.. Yeah, the field support officers. Yeah, we have a wonderful field support officer group in Skaggie county. And I'm really pleased that since COVID our numbers are building again and actually able to respond. And able to respond, that was devastating during COVID when we had a few that just simply couldn't respond, couldn't go to people's homes. And so that's a really nice thing.. And we've been working a lot more with a lot more in tandem with them as far as trying to get them notified quicker with CPR calls, trying to remind our battalion chiefs when they're en route, if they confirm CPR in progress. And the battalion chief is not on scenes like, hey, really quick, before you get there, do you want to get a support officer started? And they say, yeah, sometimes it might be a 45 minutes drive for them, so we have to send out a page. And then we had one the other day. They ended up transporting just outside of Cedar Woolly, and we had to call back the support officer coming from Bo, and they diverted to Skydive Valley Hospital to meet the patient's family. But again, like a last first responder, and they're such a huge portion. We have our own ways of dealing with things with dark humor, but that's not necessarily going to be true for family members. And the support officers of Bidcom have always been a huge part, but learning to use that resource even more and integrating them has been huge.. And a lot of places might call that chaplaincy. You may have chaplains that respond in the field.. Yes, I do know some districts, fire districts have chaplains as well as some police departments as well. Just depends on the resource that the family chooses to use as well.. Well, I have one last thing I want to bring up with you before we're kind of done here. And that is, I think you initiated this, but my understanding is you initiated the newsletter yourself.. Yes.. And you publish a newsletter. Can you kind of nutshell what you do with your newsletter?. What I started doing probably about five years ago is just as a taking the bull by the horns kind of thing, to try to bring some happiness or joy or some positivity to the workplace. Because honestly, we all work with negative Nancy's and you're not always going to be able to address people face to face with those, instead of just not putting positive vibes into the world type thing, but actually providing substance. For me that started with, I want something that can be time engaging and for people to look at in their downtime and be an outlet. So I started just really simply with a two page front and back pdf that I created using a publishing thing through Microsoft, through our office workspace. And it was an article I wrote about dealing with stresses and trauma. And then I highlight people's birthdays, anniversaries, a little bit of a did you know factoid, usually about Skagget county that people didn't know just to try to bring more awareness about local areas or people and just ods and ends. I did that for 20 to 24 issues before I needed to take a break, and I had expounded on it up to four pages in length, dealing with just anything dispatch related. And then a healthy tidbit for the dispatcher or first responder because I ended up not just sharing it with my dispatch coworkers, but I started sending them to fire departments, law officers as well, anybody in the field, just as a hey, here's this. Because I also include all the dispatchers favorite portion is this is Skadget, which highlights od radio traffic that might happen by accident or different quirky calls. Like one coming up in next month was a civil issue over properties that included a chicken by the name of omelet.. A chicken named Omelet. Yeah, I'm writing that one down too.. So I add different things in there just as a form of escapism for people to just breeze through and find light in something that they do that is so dark.. Yeah.. And then it is now interesting that you bring it up. I am going to be sending my 46th issue in two days. What are we at? Yeah, in two days I'll be sending my 46th issue, and it is now twelve pages in length.. Wow.. Which is very time consuming to create, but I find anything dispatch related or just good feels I always add something tech related that either it's from gps usage to law enforcement shield barriers, just something related to first responders and technology. Use a healthy tidbit as well. Highlight the same things with knowledge, anniversaries, birthdays, things like that. And then always highlighting different things in the area, whether it be beer festivals, wine festivals, our employee of the quarter. Just different things that I want people to be aware of. And it's like, hey, take note, zoo lights is happening. If you guys have little kids and have a day off, go down to point defiance or something like that and go check it out because there should be some sort of joy we get out of this job and not having the job be our life, but the job be a part of our life. It shouldn't envelop everything that we are. And I have lots of other projects that I do as well at work, working with recommended units, response plans, and different things for the fire departments. And I am going to be scaling back my newsletter to not nearly as lengthy, maybe four pages at most, just two pages with bare minimum because I'm unable to keep up with it anymore with the amount of things I selfishly put on my plate because I like to be involved in lots of things and have problems saying no. But I didn't realize before I came to talk with you and you brought up, oh, it's the newsletter guy. It's like, oh, yeah, you probably get that I'm second guessing my decisions now.. Well, how supportive is your workplace at either your coworkers or your leadership about your newsletter?. Very. Like I said, every single one of them. When I send out my newsletter, I can turn and see as soon as I send it out, a coworker will open it up and they'll scroll immediately to the funny radio bits from this last. So it means something that there is something that they look forward to every month. It's like what crazy stuff happened on the radio this last month. So there's a scent and warmth in that, and it is nice. I've had coworkers write articles. I've had a handful of coworkers who've written articles. I have a bachelor's in communication, and so I go through and I edit them, make them more of newspaper worthy because I understand how those need to be published. So I'll write my own articles. Sometimes I'll find some from Newsweek or something like that and put them in, but just having a wide variety. I had our ops manager write an article on the joys and satisfaction of baking. And there's like an 800 page. 800 word. Yeah. 800 word article that I.. That's a book.. Yeah. 800 word article. And I put it under healthy living because here's a way to destress, and here's how she does it. And she provided a recipe and just finding different things people are passionate about and having them write a short article, submit it to me, and get it formatted so we can share it with everybody else, because it's a common way that we can share our interests and actually find some sort of satisfaction in the work that we do.. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. I specifically recall an article that you published. It was a republish from somewhere else about the national telecommunicator shortages.. Yes.. And I'm holding that article for the resources. So I actually have it printed out in the other room, and I'm going to use it for resources for an article. I publish a newsletter first in Homish county in my role down there.. I didn't even know you were. Okay. We're up here in Wacom county. You work in Skagit county. What the heck are you doing down there?. I, too, am very black and white, and I, too, have the inability to say no, especially if what I'm asked to help with is of county. I'm basically a part time administrator for Snowmish county, and we started with a new medical program director last year. She said, we have to do better communications. And I said, would you like a newsletter? And she's like, that's what I want. So I've been publishing one to increasing levels of success. I have made a firm commitment for some rules, and one of the rules is definitely not to go to twelve pages.. Yeah. Like I said, I'm scaling back. I've overstepped my bounds.. Yeah. But this idea of reaching out with a little bit of good news and a little bit of community, and I think that the newsletter is an interesting way to do community. By the way, my master's degree is in communication.. Oh, you and my wife have so much in common.. Very cool. Well, yeah. So I love this idea of you digitally transmit it, and people can print it if they want, but it's a little bit of a throwback to old school. It doesn't require anybody to dial into a Facebook or dial into a social media platform or even to your website and blog. The information comes to them. They can decide if they want to open it or not. And there's an old school newspaper delivery kind of aspect to it that I find really nice. And I just heard from one of my msos, one of the medical service officers in Snohomish county, he said as soon as it comes in, he prints out four copies and they go to three stations in the kitchen and then the chief's bathroom.. I honestly think that's the highest compliment that can be made, is like, I look forward to this, and this is what we do with it because we appreciate it. That's saying that it's appreciated without saying those specific words. And I think you can agree that goes volumes well above just saying, oh, I love this so much, to see the action that's taking place. They say actions speak louder than words.. Exactly. And one of the greatest things kind of going because you were mentioning the previous episode, I'm sorry, it'll be two episodes ago now. But the gentleman from Richmond, Virginia, who was talking about his role in broadcast and being the PR person, one of the things that I think is really cool is this ability to attach links in your publishing now. So when you write an article and you say, contact XYZ for more. And when they click on XYz, it'll pre populate an email. And I have ways of coding those emails. It's a certain way of putting it in the subject line. So I know that this email is coming because they have clicked on a link in the newsletter. And that shows the value, it shows the use of it, because mine tends to be geared toward signing up for classes. So knowing that the classes are signed up, I published the newsletter this class got signed up for, ergo, one plus the other. So that's been really good. But, Matthew, this has been really wonderful. I have a plan. I just want to let you know that, first of all, we've filled our hour and just a little bit more, which is fantastic. We have to take out for all of my stomach grumbling, but I am going to plan sometime after our 25th episode. So that's going to be several months from now, if not next year. You and Cody have to sit down together. Oh, I need to make sure that you meet.. We met.. Oh, you have met.. One of the funniest things is because I don't know who's ever messaging me because it just shows the apparatus.. Oh, yeah.. So I'm always very hesitant. But I recognize his voice on the radio. We've met twice.. Okay.. In the six years I've known him by voice. And one of them was the best thing I could say is the most awesomest interaction. He was driving louder 125 at station two. And I got to take my autistic son to go see him when he came in. When he finished a call, I'd just gotten off work. I went and picked up my son. We went and met him after he finished a call and my son Gideon got to sit in the front seat, crawl around. Favorite part was making the windows go up and down.. Oh, yeah.. But I got to bs with Cody for about 30 minutes while my son got just the highlight of his year playing with the fire truck.. Oh, I love it. I really love that.. So I have met him once and he resembles. Not resembles, but his personality is a very dear friend of mine that I have worked alongside for a very long time. And it's the same level of intimacy and feeding off of each other like dorks. And so it's like, it's very natural fit, as I'm sure you've heard on the radio.. Well, then I'm definitely. It's going to be a reunion tour. I'm going to bring you back. I'm going to bring him in. That'll be hysterical. So thank you so much for being here.. Thank you so much for having me. I hope you don't have to edit too much of this out.. Nah, just my stomach gurgling..