Besides some of the other fun peculiarities of the lingo of copland, some territories (usually larger cities than mine) also get the added bonus of heavy use of 10 codes over the airwaves.
These codes usually sound like 10-100 or 10-6 (or 10-4, good buddy, if you're one of *those* people), but can also start with other numbers. 1000, 5000, 100, 500, 9, 2, whatever.
You can sometimes find crib sheets to local 10 codes, but of course they're not always accurate (one Nashua sheet lists 9-8 as a disorderly crowd, but I've heard it many times for juveniles). I think the obvious value of 10 codes is that you can use them to quickly make unambiguous statements, which is handy during a riot, for example.
You might hear someone come over the scanner referring to a "9-1, going good," which usually means a domestic dispute that has turned into a donnybrook, or "subject is highly 9-2," which means somebody's whisky glass has been filled and emptied at least one too many times.
So one night, a slow night at work, one of my top 10 favorite people turns to me and says, "You know, maybe some day I can have some 9-8s, and they can get 9-2 and start some 9-1s."
As you can imagine, our jobs were nonstop action.
Showing posts with label copland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copland. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Thursday, July 12, 2007
In rout
I finally caved the other day to two purchases: Book the last for Harry Potter, and an Airport Extreme base station for my growing home network.
The book had to happen at some point. Twenty-odd bucks seems a bit steep, but as Jason Bourne once said, fuck it.
I said the same thing myself, but possibly more than once, about the base station. We have pretty straightforward networking needs at home: Three users, two of whom are wireless. This should be pretty god-damned simple, but of course it is not.
We bought a Belkin (that's an Old English word for completely the fuck useless) router, which sometimes is really satisfactory, but sometimes requires me to perform all sorts of confusing rituals to get a stable signal.
I have a high tolerance for technological hassles, so when I start cursing about computers, the situation is well on its way to totally out of hand.
The upshot, after much more ado than necessary, is that a new router is en route to my location.
That reminds me: If you spend any time at all listening to police scanners, you are familiar with the re-pronunciation of en route as In Rout. As far as I can tell, this re-pronunciation is universal.
When I hear those words, as I just did here in my office in sunny Walla Walla, they conjure an image of a couple of patrol cars fleeing ahead of an advancing column of Visigoths.
Alas, this never comes to pass.
The book had to happen at some point. Twenty-odd bucks seems a bit steep, but as Jason Bourne once said, fuck it.
I said the same thing myself, but possibly more than once, about the base station. We have pretty straightforward networking needs at home: Three users, two of whom are wireless. This should be pretty god-damned simple, but of course it is not.
We bought a Belkin (that's an Old English word for completely the fuck useless) router, which sometimes is really satisfactory, but sometimes requires me to perform all sorts of confusing rituals to get a stable signal.
I have a high tolerance for technological hassles, so when I start cursing about computers, the situation is well on its way to totally out of hand.
The upshot, after much more ado than necessary, is that a new router is en route to my location.
That reminds me: If you spend any time at all listening to police scanners, you are familiar with the re-pronunciation of en route as In Rout. As far as I can tell, this re-pronunciation is universal.
When I hear those words, as I just did here in my office in sunny Walla Walla, they conjure an image of a couple of patrol cars fleeing ahead of an advancing column of Visigoths.
Alas, this never comes to pass.
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