Pretty Serious Dudes.

With all the talk of PSD on other blogs, I thought I would share something that happened to me about a year ago, before I began to dice with my career the way Julian Clary dices with masculinity.

We have a couple of "satellite" stations in Blandmore which are occupied solely by Beat Officers, by which I mean office-based old-timers who never wear their stab vests and do not even know what a Domestic Violence Risk Assessment is. These stations play a vital role in keeping further out villages in touch with their local police force, in the sense that their doors display a banner with the address to write to in order to complain about the front counter always being shut.

I find these stations play a vital role in my sanity. When it is quiet or the only jobs going sound a bit too griefy, I will tuck myself away in one of these hidey holes, content in the knowledge that no one would ever imagine that someone is there tapping away at the computer in the dead of night (after all, it is a police station). This gives me the opportunity to catch up on my paperwork, otherwise known as emailing my pals.

On one occasion I spent a good two hours downloading comical videos and stories about police officers and cartoon characters breaching the new Sexual Offences Act. I should add that these videos and stories were sent to me, of course I did not surf the Net and locate them myself. Suffice it to say that the videos and stories were all forwarded to the relevant parties and I then decided that a couple of the stories deserved to be printed out and brought home with me. Using my skilled computer knowledge, I located the local printer which I BELIEVED was entitled PSDO (P being the inital of the station and SDO denoting the Station Duty Office or front counter). Half an hour later I logged off and went to collect my treasures from the SDO printer. Nada. There was paper, the printer was online, just nothing had printed.

I was now being summonsed to a critical incident involving two neighbours and a bag of sugar, so I shrugged this off as typical of our useless printers and forgot all about it.

Two days later I received all my emails and stories printed out in the post, along with the following note:

"PC Bloggs, These items were discovered on the printer of the Professional Standards Department. Perhaps you would like to dispose of them yourself in the relevant way?"

D'oh!

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