Encrypted Connection

Joey: One

"911, what's your emergency?", Joey asked as he rubbed his eyes. Tonight had been quite eventful at the central dispatch. Two car accidents, three random injuries, one screaming woman who thought she was giving birth but only passing gas after all, a very arrogant guy stuck in an elevator and an old man who fell in his house.

Surrounded by screens, Joey watched the system locate the next call as a woman's voice echoed in his headphone.

"Hi. What's your name?", she asked, very calmly.

"Joey, ma'am. How can I help you?".

"Hi, Joey. My name's Janice. I'm having quite a situation here, I'm afraid.", she explained, rather embarrassed. Many noises of broken glass and stuff hitting the ground were coming from a distance behind her voice.

"It's okay, Janice. Are you hurt? In danger?", he asked while balancing his chair. It was the worth part of his job: having to stay still and focused.

"Oh dear, I hope not. But there's an alligator in my kitchen.", she finally told him.

Joey opened his mouth to say something, the two front legs of his chair hitting the floor quite hard as his jaw dropped.

"Say that again?", he blinked.

"Ah yes erm....", Janice answered. "See, I left the garage door open. Usually, my son comes to close it because I'm too old for that sort of stunt. But he's out of town. And ...well, I went downstairs to get myself some water and here it was. It probably came through the garage door. It's quite ...big."

Joey looked around him. The other dispatchers were busy and they would probably look at him weird if he asked what the protocol was when it came to alligators.

Leaning over his keyboard, he hit a few keys on his keyboard and squinted as he watched the images displayed by the street cameras in front of Janice's house.

He wasn't allowed to access them but he had to be sure this wasn't a joke or the hallucination of a very nice old lady who forgot to take her meds.

But he couldn't get any of the cameras to zoom enough on the house.

Checking again on his coworkers briefly, he hit more keys and connected himself to the home assistance system registered in Janice's name. Her son probably thought it would be a good idea to install such a thing in case his dear mom would fall and be unable to get to the phone.

"Holy shit", he gasped as he finally got a view of the kitchen thanks to the camera supposed to keep an eye on the old lady, only after a supervisor activated it or the old lady used a safe word to activate it.

Details, Joey thought before staring at the big ass gator making a mess in the old fashioned kitchen.

"Language", Janice corrected him with a light giggle.

"Janice, I have to say, you sound pretty calm for a lady who just faced a gator", he commented.

"Ah well, I don't think it can climb stairs. And it must be lost. Are you going to send someone to bring it back to wherever it belongs?", she asked.

Joey's supervisor, Peter, looked above his screen and Joey smiled cheekily at him, raising a thumb up with one hand before putting his laptop discretely back in his bag with the other.

The man got up and came to him, standing behind him.

"Of course! I'm sending a patrol car and animal control your way right away. They're going to shit themselves, I'm telling you", he joked before glaring when Peter gave him a tick on the top of his head.

"I mean....this is highly unusual", he grumbled. "Stay upstairs, I'll tell them they can come in through the garage door. We just need to make sure you're safe.", he added in the most professional tone he could find.