I made a blithe comment on Twitter last night and someone took, well not offense really, but made a comment, so I thought I would address it here.

Any of you who follow me on twitter will know that I spend much of my Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings moaning about my job and some of the people that I have to deal with.

You wouldn’t know it from my tweets, but taking the 999 emergency calls (which I have blogged about before), is a very small (but important) part of my job and I dislike doing it a lot, for reasons which see above re: blogged about before.

The meat of my job is to deal with those calls by despatching the relevant officers to the scene and assisting those officers in carrying out their duties, doing research, making calls, and above all being the calm steady voice on the radio when they need assistance.

Whilst I moan and complain about various aspects of the job I do, such as the people who dial 999 to complain they can’t get onto the internet or want us to break up with their girlfriend for them, I rarely mention the serious incidents that I deal with on a day to day basis. The fatal road traffic accidents, the stabbings, the rapes, the robberies, the domestic abuse, the child abuse, the list goes on. These incidents are not to be taken lightly, these incidents are not be made fun of in a public forum, and I deal with one or more of these incidents every single night.

The way to get through the night without being a casualty myself is to use humour. It is said that those who work in the emergency services, or on the front lines have the sickest sense of humour. I concur. I would never repeat some of the things we say at work to get us through the intense horror of the situations we have to deal with. They are not meant to be taken literally, but they are the only way that we can deal with these things without breaking down.

Where I can share these trivialities, is on the lighter subjects, and so I will endearingly call the general public, the great unwashed, or make sarcastic comments about the latest ‘customer’ to dial 999 for no good reason. It’s not social comment, I am not a spokesperson for the police, it’s my warped sense of humour that gets me through the night.

I am very proud of the work I do, I am very proud of the work the police do under increasingly difficult circumstances. There is at least one occasion every night when I feel I have helped someone and am actually at work for the reasons I took the job.

To be frank, those who take offense to my comments, who take them as anything but what they are, my tongue-in-cheek, offhand way of getting through the night, you are probably the people who call my husband and my friends ‘pigs’ and ‘filth’, and mean it, and quite frankly I couldn’t give a frak about your bigoted opinion. And you smell.

On a more serious note, it has raised the issue that some people may believe that I am being representative of the police, and whether I care if they do. I love the openness of Twitter, and I love the outlet that it gives me, but I now face the dilemma of either, making my account private, or letting go of that outlet altogether and becoming much more reserved in my tweeting.