I recently came across our digital scanner, which I updated with a newer DSP firmware, and I dug up some good batteries. I’ve been keeping it on fairly often, and have to say that I’m glad I have.

I think I kind of got accustomed to the Waltham/Boston scene, where it wasn’t that uncommon to hear officers being dispatched to a shooting or a carjacking or similar. I did hear an awfully exciting call Sunday (?) night, in which an officer was dispatched to an alarm activation (very routine: it seems like there are constant false activations), and reported that there was a hole cut in the back door with a torch and the smell of the torch was still in the air. Basically every officer high-tailed it over there, and they surrounded the building while waiting for State Police to bring in a dog to search the building… Turned out that they’d already left, though. (Without stealing anything, though I didn’t find that out until I saw it on the news the next evening.)

But more often than not, the calls are laughably mundane. So the highlights for today and yesterday:

• Yesterday: “I’ll be off with three males… having an altercation over, uhh… a baseball cap.”
• Today, I only caught the tail end of it, but it was a dispatcher giving out a call: “regarding some fake swans on her property… in her way.”

The best part is that you can tell they’re trying their hardest to remain serious, as if they’re pausing trying to find a way to make the call not sound laughably unimportant.