911:: was: Dept. E-mail now: Fax machines

September 19, 2000

Funny you should mention fax machines ...

About 2 years ago the comm center fax machine was in the teletype room, which

doesn't have a door but is still pretty much isolated from the rest of the comm

center. The shift rosters would come in on the fax machine - 5 precincts, county

is 70+ miles long, so except for North they have to fax them or we'd never get

them. TTY operator would get busy and not see the rosters sitting there ... then

everyone and their brother would start coming available and we wouldn't know who

they were. Major pain in the butt. Moved the fax into the radio room - problem

solved.

A few months ago the guy in charge of one of the community policing units

decided he needed a copy of one precinct's rosters faxed to him for each shift,

3 shifts in a day. When you have to do it for an extended period of time that's

a lot of faxing and we have better stuff to do and not enough people to do it

anyway. Not only that, since the sergeant had to fax the roster to us, why

didn't the sergeant fax it down to the CPU office since he was already faxing it

anyway. Made sense to us.

That conversation ended with a command staff member telling a shift supervisor

he could come down and show us how to work the fax machine. I'll refrain from

comment on what we all thought of that.

Finally someone faxed a couple of days' worth of rosters from ALL the precincts

.... wasn't me, but I thought real hard about doing it.

So the short version of that long story is ... I agree with you, !

Michele Hriciso

Brevard County Sheriff's Office, FL

E911Tigger@...

ICQ 28949458

AOL or MSN IM - E911Tigger

----- Original Message -----

One of my " peeves " ... In our situation, there is no reason why the

fax machine is in radio... sending, receiving and filing faxes should

not be a dispatchers job.... Just one more thing for dispatch to do...

Weintraut

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