Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

One of the things I’ve always loved about dispatching is how much you’re expected to know. A little bit of everything, all the time.

Most agencies do a solid job covering the obvious basics. How to talk to people when they’re panicked or angry. Criminal codes. Enough fire science to not sound clueless. Psychology. Crisis intervention. How to keep your voice steady when everything else is falling apart.

But that’s just the foundation.

You also have to know your place. Your actual place. Not just highways and mileposts, but the texture of the community. Which bar gets rowdy on Friday nights. Which restaurant always forgets to lock the back door. Where the concerts are, where traffic will choke up, which events are going to generate calls before they even start. Dispatchers don’'t just serve a jurisdiction. They live inside it, hour by hour, call by call.

That kind of work changes you. Anyone who’s done this job for more than a minute knows that. There are real downsides to that change, and they’re not hard to name. Stress. Burnout. A heavier view of humanity than most people ever have to carry.

But there’s also something quietly powerful that comes with it.

Dispatch teaches perspective.

Zooming in helps you solve a problem. Zooming out helps you understand the world. Dispatchers learn how to do both, sometimes in the span of a few seconds.

Perspective, in this job, means knowing what’s a big deal and what isn’t. It means being able to hear frustration, anger, and urgency without letting every single one of them hijack your nervous system. It’s understanding, deep in your bones, that not everything labeled an “emergency” actually is one… even when it feels that way to the caller.

Dispatchers learn to prioritize life over limb, and limb over property. People over things. Every dispatcher knows this hierarchy instinctively, but the difference is that we don’t just agree with it in theory. We practice it, constantly. Calls get stacked. Incidents get triaged. Resources get pulled from one place and sent to another. Perspective isn’t a philosophy in dispatch. It’s the air you breathe.

That lesson really crystallized for me a few years into my career.

I took one of those calls. The kind you never forget, no matter how many years go by. A baby who had stopped breathing. A mother doing everything she could, her voice breaking, trying to save her child while I tried to keep her focused. We worked it. Responders arrived. I hung up the phone.

And then I answered the next call.

“911, what’s your emergency?”

It wasn’t another medical. It wasn’t anything high-risk or time-critical. It was a noise complaint. Loud music at a neighbor’s house. The caller was having a miserable day because of it. Bad enough that he’d decided this rose to the level of dialing 911.

As I took down his information, I remember glancing back at the medical call on my screen. Waiting. Hoping for an update. Wondering if paramedics were going to transport that baby. Wondering how that story was going to end.

Two worlds, side by side. One holding a family’s worst moment. The other holding someone’s intolerance for bass through a wall.

That moment stuck with me.

Not because the noise complaint was ridiculous. To that caller, it mattered. It was real to him. But because dispatch forces you to hold both realities at the same time. To treat people with respect while never losing sight of what truly carries weight.

That’s perspective.

It doesn’t make you cold. If anything, it sharpens your empathy. You learn that people don’t always call because something is catastrophic. Sometimes they call because they’re overwhelmed, isolated, or out of tools. You also learn, very quickly, that real emergencies don’t announce themselves with drama. They just arrive, uninvited, and demand everything you’ve got.

Dispatching has a way of quietly rewiring how you see the world outside the center, too. Traffic feels different when you’ve heard the aftermath. Arguments sound smaller when you’ve listened to someone say goodbye over a phone line. A lot of things that once felt urgent start to lose their edge.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff… and it’s all small stuff” sounds like a cliché until you’ve lived in a job where the difference between small and big actually matters.

Dispatch teaches you that difference.

Every shift. Every call. Sometimes back to back.

And if that’s not a masterclass in perspective, I’m not sure what is.