Phones ringing and people chattering at their designated stations greet Hall County 911 communications officers when they come into work.
Sherri Budge has been greeted that way for 13 years and she has no trouble getting situated at her station with six computer monitors staring back at her. Once she started answering 911 calls in May 2008, she was hooked.
"My now ex-husband was in law enforcement for a while. And I was always really interested in that side of it, but I was too big a chicken," she laughed. "I came here. I had no idea how this worked... Once I started doing it, it just kind of gets in your blood."
Budge said the best part of the job is when a call results in the best-case scenario for everyone involved.
"But on top of that, it's just pretty much the anticipation of what's coming next," Budge said. "I think that a lot of us are that way. We just wait for the little adrenaline shot."
Unfortunately, things do not always work out for the best. Budge said her most memorable call, and one of the worst, came the night Deputy Nicolas Blane Dixon with the Hall County Sheriff's Office was shot and killed after pursuing a suspect.
"I was working that night," she said. "I don't ever want to go through that again... I heard 'shots fired.' And then I heard [Dixon] say 'I'm hit.'"
She said everyone in the room came together amidst the chaos and knew their part to play to get them the help they needed.
"I went back and listened to [the call] later. You could just hear it. The panic," Budge said. She said that despite that, watching everyone work together in the midst of the tragedy was "really cool" to see.
Calls such as the Dixon shooting and cases involving children and elderly people can take a toll on the communication officers' mental health.
An article on pubmed.gov said call-takers and dispatchers are often exposed to duty-related trauma, placing them at increased risk for developing mental health challenges like stress, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Michele Hill, Associate Department Head and Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of North Georgia, said it is important to know the warning signs that show the stress is getting to be too much to handle.
"I think [warning signs would be] if a person is feeling very unsettled and beginning to lose sleep," she said. "If they're sort of feeling very overwhelmed and burned out."
According to an article in PeerJ, common stressors identified included "being exposed to traumatic calls, lacking control over high workload, and working in under-resourced and pressured environments." The article also said that lack of support from management can be an additional source of stress, but Budge says administrators in Hall County have made themselves readily available to help.
"The admins are always saying, you know, 'we're here if you need us. Any time, day or night, call us. If you just need to talk, if you need to vent, if you need whatever,'" Budge said.
There are also resources in place to help communications officers with particularly difficult situations.
The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) offers free and confidential assessments, short-term counseling, referrals and follow-up services to employees who have personal and/or work-related problems, according to the United States Office of Personnel Management website. Budge said she has used the service before and appreciated the feedback she received.
"We all deal with it a little bit differently," Budge said. "I just compartmentalize and just usually talk to somebody about it... [I] say 'hey, did I do everything I could have done? What else could I have done? What could I have done better?'"
Hill said compartmentalizing is crucial for anybody experiencing a lot of stress, especially when they are hearing about traumatic or serious situations.
"I think compartmentalizing is a healthy thing," she said. "Compartmentalizing means that you can put a situation sort of into a mental box and keep it safe."
Budge explained that it was harder to deal with the emotional strain when she first started the job. She would often worry that she was becoming cold or losing her empathy.
"You just feel like you don't feel things anymore," Budge said. "But then you get that one call and you're like, 'okay. They're still there.'"
That feeling is known as "compassion fatigue."
"By helping people that are in distress, [911 communications officers] end up in this sort of extreme state of just constant tension," Hill said. "What will happen is, I think, individuals can either burn out, or they can become more traumatized, or they can lose that sense of compassion for individuals as they become just incredibly strained or fatigued."
Budge said that she feels 911 communications officers do not lose their empathy, but sometimes they have to bury it a bit deeper.
The extensive training process for incoming communications officers is in place to prepare them for the job as much as possible. Budge said it all starts with a minimum of six weeks of training, during which they learn all the jargon, codes and local geography. They also listen to practice calls to get an idea of what real calls could sound like. That period is followed by around six months of working with a trainer to get a handle on communicating with callers and documenting the necessary information simultaneously. For the first 12 months, new hires are considered "trainees."
Rebecca Holcombe, another call-taker with Hall County, comes into work every day and answers a variety of 911 calls in quick succession. One call came in from a concerned husband, reporting that his wife had fallen and was hurt. Another man called and said the car driving in front of him was driving recklessly, weaving in and out of the lane. A woman called and said she was worried that someone broke into her house and may still be inside. All of the calls came in within 10 minutes.
As soon as Holcombe answered a call, she started inputting information into the computer system. Depending on the type of call, the program provided a script for her, telling her what questions to ask and even prompting her to reassure the caller that help was on the way.
When asked if she was always that busy, all Holcombe had time to say was, "feels that way, sometimes."
Some aspects of the job are often misunderstood, like what goes on behind the scenes when communications officers take a call. Budge said people are often angered by the questioning and do not realize that help is already on the way.
"A lot of people think that when we answer the phone and we're asking questions, we're holding up everything, which is not the case," Budge said. "...Sometimes you have to stop and explain to him... I'm getting information to the responding officer who is on the way or will be very shortly."
Budge said she takes her job incredibly seriously.
"We learn and we improve every day, I think. If we don't, we don't need to be here," she said. "This is my job, but it's their lives."
