My old job.

I could not got to sleep last night.  I tossed and turned and just turned on the light and grabbed a book I got where I used worked.  It is like a school yearbook, but it was for the police department, the 25th year book.  I used to work for the police department in Las Vegas.  The department had just become merged with the city and county, so we were called Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.  I went to work there in 1973.  I went there, did an interview and took a typing test and was hired.  Now they have oral boards, tests, you have to jump through hoops to get hired, but back then, they didn’t do all that.  In fact, I had just washed my hair the day they called. I had long hair, almost to my waist.  The phone rang and I picked it up.  They wanted me to come in to work right then.  I said, “I have to dry my hair and I will be in.  I was working at a department store called Grants.  It was kind of like a K-Mart store.  I called them and said I got a new job and I quit.  They were jerks anyway.  I worked there for a year and I wanted a nickel raise and they would not give me one.  I think back on that and think , “Wow, they would not even spring for a nickel.”   Back then the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour.   I liked working for the police department.  I worked in the Records Bureau.  This was before you could type on computers.  We did have small computers just to run names and get their arrest records.  You had to type everything on type writers.  We would sit at a type writer and plug ear phones in our ears and listen to the recording made by police officers.  They would call  in and record the arrest report.  Then we would type it.  You had to listen and then back it up and listen and type what you heard.  If you made a mistake, whip out the white out and re-type it.  I am sure they probably still listen to the arrest reports, but now they can type it on a computer and just send it electronically over to the jail. 

I really liked working on the teletype machine.  You put this ribbon paper in it and then type it and as you typed it, it would punch holes in the paper.  Then you had to dial a number and run the paper that you typed into the machine and it printed out the teletype and sent it out too.  But if you did a type mistake, you had to start all over, which kind of sucked.  They don’t have to do that anymore either.    I found a picture of kind of what it looked like.

Ours was in the back of the building and it looked old.  It probably was old.   We didn’t have any guys typing in our department.  We also had to take citizen reports.  We rotated jobs, answering phones, doing the typing of the police reports, teletypes and waiting the counter and taking reports.  I didn’t like the typing police reports.  Those officers would send in people that were beat to a pulp.   You sat at this desk out in the lobby and type what people would tell you.  They would be all bleeding and getting blood all over the chair and desk.  I felt really bad for them, but I didn’t like looking at them either.  They should have went to the doctor.  I would try to hurry and do the report and tell them to go to the hospital.  They needed stitches. 

Then then got little rooms for us to sit in with the people, they were like closets with a tiny desk, a type writer, a chair for me and 2 chairs for the people.  I would call them and we went into the little room and shut the door and I would take their report.  I would have them tell me their story and I would type it word for word and hand it to them to sign and they would read it and say, “I didn’t say that, I want it typed again.”  I then had to start over.  I just started giving them a form and tell them to write what happened and then I would type it.  One lady got in a fight with her teenage daughter and wanted to file a battery report against her.  She pulled up her dress, which I didn’t want to see, because I just typed the report.  She had a giant bruise all over her side down her leg.  Her daughter beat the crap out of her.  I would send those people to get photos…..again, the police officer should have called out a photographer to photograph them. 

One guy came in and lit up a cigar in that little room.  I hate cigar smoke so I told him, “This room is too small and I can’t breath, put it out.”  He  got all huffy.  A lot of officers take reports out in the field, but they sent in a lot of people too.  It was very busy.  I worked in Records for a year or two and then I put in for a jobs doing Grants.  I got the job, so I was transferred to Research and Development.

To be continued.