When you just can't take it anymore...

For the most part, I really love my job. My co-workers are fantastic, I'm rarely lacking for excitement, and I get to handle drugs and guns on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes, however, the failures of the system, the idiocy or cruelty of juvenile delinquents and the tragedy of poor parenting makes me want to do something drastic. Thankfully, the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy offers an outlet for those frustrations.

This past Wednesday I volunteered as a person in crisis for OPOTA's Hostage Negotiation Training. My job was to be a person in a hostage situation and allow the trainees to use the skills they'd learned in the previous days to "talk me down." It was awesome, exhausting, and surprisingly therapeutic.

I was given a brief sketch of my character, then allowed to elaborate at will. For two 45 minute periods, I paced up and down on a catwalk, muttering, screaming, and hysterical, while threatening to throw myself and/or my 6 month old baby over the railing. (They gave me a dummy--weirdly enough, it was a dummy baby that was covered in fake blood and had a tracheotomy tube--from prior trainings, I suppose?) My tragic character had woken up that morning to find her boyfriend gone, and her tip money from working at Hooters missing as well. She had never wanted the baby, and knew that her boyfriend was, as I told the negotiators, a womanizer and a jackass. (I got to do A LOT of swearing.) With no family in town, I had nothing to live for, and a baby I couldn't support.
The negotiators did a great job of trying to calm me down; their job was made that much more difficult when the trainer would hold up a note telling me to dangle the baby over the ledge or start ranting about suicide. For me, it was a great way to blow off steam and get ridiculously emotional--by the end I was completely worn out but in a fantastic mood.
So, when you've reached the end of your rope, and you're ready to gun down your co-workers, I'd recommend calling up OPOTA and checking to see if they need volunteer hostages. They're there for you.

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