Funny calls(Part 1)

 This past weekend I was working with an old partner from back in the day, we were talking about my blog. Suddenly she said, "You should tell the donkey story!" So I started jotting down some of the stories that made me laugh. When I was working in town I worked the night truck, so everything is different at night. They are in no particular order, but they all make me laugh. 

One early morning around 2 a.m. we were dispatched to a call near the old Savannah fairgrounds for a person who was assaulted. We went in route and waited for the police to clear the scene before we made patient contact. We saw the officer and followed him in, the patient was a little older so we didn't feel any threat. So we were all standing there talking and suddenly there was a blood-curdling scream that came from the fairground animal area. It sounded like a woman was being attacked and screaming for her life. The officer whipped around quickly and grabbed his weapon saying "What the hell was that?" My partner hid behind me like I was a tree and said "Holy crap" and hid behind me. I started laughing! The officer and my partner looked at me with a look saying "What the heck are you laughing at?!". Finally, they asked why, I told them that what they heard was a donkey screaming. They both said I was full of crap. Needless to say, the rest of that call was uneventful. The next night we stopped at the fairgrounds, and I yelled to one of the barn workers..."Do you guys have a donkey?" The guy kind of chuckled and said that they did. Next, he said, "Why was it screaming last night?" I still laugh about that night whenever I see a donkey. 

On another night with a different partner, this one was bigger than me and SWAT trained so he was just wound different. We get a call in a shady part of town for a mental patient who wants to harm himself. Mind you I am six foot two weighing 275 at that time, my partner was several inches shorter but outweighed me by 50-60 pounds...Nobody is going to mess with us. We arrived on the scene, and we saw the guy standing there with a small gym bag. My partner and I get out of the truck, and my partner says sternly  "Put the bag down and up against the wall. The guy did what he was told. My partner goes up to the guy, he tells him to put his hands up on the wall and spread his legs. So he has him in the typical law enforcement frisking position and as he is patting him down he is asking him...(as I open the bag) Do you have any knives, guns, bazookas, or child porn? The guy goes, Yes. My partner and I look at each other in surprise, my partner says "Yes to which one? The guy says, child porn. Again we look at each other surprised. It was about this time that the officer arrived on the scene. He gets out of his cruiser, and he sees a guy up against the wall and two paramedics with a shocked look on their faces. I can only imagine what was going through his head at that moment. 

We're on a call in a semi-nice part of town in a nice house, we were called for an elderly lady who wasn't feeling well. I remember that the patient was seated in a high-back chair, she was flanked by a couple of family members. My partner was standing there taking the patient's vital signs as I was talking to the family. I see a small movement out of the corner of my eye, when I turn to see what it is I see a palmetto bug. If you don't know what a palmetto bug is, it is a huge cockroach-looking bug. They look scary and they fly. So I saw it heading right for my partner, I knew that would not be good if...she saw it or it jumped or flew on her. I didn't say a word, I waited until it was right by her foot and told her to lift her right foot. My partner lifted her right foot without question and when I told her to put it down she did. What she did not know was that when she put her foot down she squished that palmetto bug. I told her later in the shift when she asked me why I told her to do that...then she hit me!

Back to my SWAT guy partner. We liked to cruise around downtown just to see what was going on. He had a radio that had all of the police department(PD) channels on it, so we got to hear everything that was going on. So, one night we heard that PD was after a car that had shot at one of their officers. On hearing that we did a U-turn to head towards the action. There is a lot of radio traffic and it was pretty hard to keep up with where they were exactly. We knew that the suspect had bailed out of his car and that he had again shot at officers but we didn't know where they were. We got close to the last general area where we heard PD talking about. Then clear as day they call out the street name that the suspect had run down. Coincidentally we had stopped right next to one of the old Savannah cement street markers and the street name that PD just said was the exact same street name that was on the marker outside my door. At the moment that I made that clear my partner looked at me like..."That's not good(in a funny kind of way)!  Then we heard shots fired pretty close to us, they were followed by PD calling for EMS. Needless to say, we had the fastest response time to a shooting in our services history.

When you work downtown for a while you get to know the police officers, you build a rapport with them, and they look out for you and you look out for them. One cold night we were called to a man down. As we arrived on the scene I saw an officer friend of mine standing next to this guy that was on the ground. My officer friend was kind of favoring one foot, I asked him if he was ok. He said I will be. I noticed first that the person who we were called for was in a neighborhood where he should not have been. Truthfully, this guy was lucky that he was found by the officer because something might have happened to him had he not. I asked the officer what happened and why were we there. The officer said he saw the guy lying on the ground and when he tried to wake him up he wouldn't wake up. He tried to tap the patient's foot with his foot but that didn't work. So the officer used a little more force kicking the patient in the leg. Upon landing a quick blow he felt a sharp pain in his foot, bad for him but it did wake up the patient. The first thing he said when he woke up was "Why are you kicking me in my metal leg?! Come to find out, the patient had a titanium leg and my friend hit it just right causing him a bunch of pain. Silly rabbit!