March 8
Houchins quit Sunday! He’s going to work at the new Red Rock Station at Charleston and 215. He said he’ll be making less, but he has an Air Force pension and he more or less freeloads off his wife anyway. Plus he noted his drive will be shorter and more convenient.
I am neither in mourning nor denial like I was with D-Dawg because Houchins isn’t on the shift anymore, but I liked Houchins. He was pretty funny.
March 10
Here was your Henry lineup for my first hour last night:
Henry 1 – moi
Henry 2 – Mike S.
Henry 3 – Catan
I was on the second floor near the wedding chapel on my way to the hotel at 2215, having just wrapped up giving some high school girls from San Diego an impromptu tour of the wedding chapel and ballrooms when we went four-nine-nine for a woman who had taken entirely too much insulin before dinner.
(I had given the tour because I ran into them on the second-floor E-Core. I had stopped by the EDR on my way to the hotel for a refreshing beverage before starting my night’s labors and they were there as I went to the elevators. Evidently they watched a lot of tee-vee and they wanted to know if we had any secret passageways or anything like that and seemed disappointed when I told them we didn’t.)
I get to the room and there is a man and his girlfriend, both from Omaha, there. She is sitting on the bed propped up by her boyfriend and they guy demands to know if we brought the glucose gun and got peeved when I said no, which, you will recall, is a reaction you get sometimes from guests who need help when you are not able to wave a magic wand and immediately solve their problem.
Look, I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on tee-vee. I have some first aid training and some common sense, but that’s about it; the sight of me bursting through your hotel room door with your girlfriend rather inert should not set your spirits soaring. I’ve run into this enough that it must be a normal human reaction.
You have to let stuff like this go because responding with a cross attitude will only get you a cross attitude in return. He had already called room service to bring some orange juice and it was delivered in short order and paramedics were right behind them.
Diabetic calls are not uncommon. Either they haven’t eaten or they took the wrong medication at the wrong time or they took an incorrect dose. And if you are going to have a diabetic episode, a casino isn’t a bad place to have one. We can get you orange juice or something else with sugar in fairly short order. If you’re in the casino a cocktail waitress or a security officer can take care of it and while it takes a bit longer calling room service, they’re accustomed to dropping everything and getting something up there quickly.
Junior sends me to do the report almost immediately afterward, which was brilliant. Usually, reports like this will wait till later in the shift, after the Henry unit’s first 10-10’s and 482’s are out of the way, but Junior thought with a four-nine-nine right off the bat we could be in for a busy night and it was best to get the report out of the way right now.
There was a funny instance with Rich and Bi-Bob last night. I had inadvertently left my jacket in the changing room and Bi-Bob comes into the briefing room and tells me that and I go get it and when I get back to the briefing room Rich said “You should’ve seen what Bob did to your jacket in there.”
“Uh oh,” I mutter.
“He took it into the can and when he came out all he was wearing was boots and your jacket. He was smiling, too.”
“Fabulous,” I said.
Bi-Bob had a childish grin.
“Don’t put your hands in the pockets,” he said.
Here is your Henry lineup for tonight:
Henry 1 – moi
Henry 2 – X-Ray
Henry 3 – Lee
Lee and X-Ray will switch, just like last week, because X-Ray likes being Henry 3 and Lee prefers to be Henry 2. Why 77Dwayne continues to meddle with the schedule like this is still not clear. It’s not good to mess with the always-so.
