I switched back to my "old" team Saturday night. I had not even minded the lack of warning and the being switched in the middle of the pay period since I would get to work weekend nights (which is usually a time when there's a decent amount of action.) Boy, was I ever wrong. Yes, I got to work weekend nights, but No, there was not a decent amount of action. In fact, there was darn near NO action. Maybe the cold snap drove everyone inside, but absolutely nothing happened all weekend. Bleh! Boring!

I had a trainee in my car (transfered from a neighboring agency, so he has a bit of a clue) and after about four hours of riding around with nary a call, he asked, somewhat tentatively and rather wistfully, "Does it ever get... busy?" I did my best to assure him that the dearth of crime and anarchy was not the norm, especially on a Saturday night, but I'm not sure he believed me. It didn't help that we worked a 13 hour shift due to the time change. That extra hour made it ten times as painful.

And last night was no better. There were only two items on the shift activity report at the end of the night--at the bottom of which my Lieutenant typed, "I have no explanation for it, but it was an unbelievably slow weekend!"

My trainee left early last night around 10pm since he had to go do some other training in the morning. By 2am I was going mildly nuts with boredom and was fighting to stay awake. Fortunately one of my state trooper buddies called me on my Nextel to ask me if I wanted to go grab a bite to eat. We killed about 45 minutes with eating, and then after we cleared (we advise our dispatchers when we're eating if we don't want them to dispatch traffic to us), we parked up to shoot the shit and killed another half hour or so until he was called to a wreck on the interstate. I drove around for another half an hour or so until I realized that I was about to fall asleep at the wheel and wouldn't recognize a crime in progress if it slapped me in the face--and then gave up and went back to the office. Bleh!