When I was on my next shift, I couldn’t concentrate on my call. It was a simple laceration, an art student who got too tired and cut himself with an Xacto-knife. I asked all the wrong questions and made her sign the form in the wrong places. Finally, the crew chief stepped in, thanked me and remedied everything. He didn’t ask me what was wrong. He just fixed it.

The debrief would have been painful if I had been paying attention. I was too wrapped up in berating myself for my own mistakes and for how frustrating the police had been that I wasn’t listening to my crew chief. I knew I hadn’t passed. Even when I did really well on calls I didn’t pass. Every crew chief would find a small reason to say that my performance had been too slow, not thorough enough, that I hadn’t asked the questions in the right order. Basically, they were saying that I didn’t do it like they had done it. Many years later, this would become standardized which would speed up the process of advancement. But when I was doing it, we learned the unique styles of everyone who could pass us on a call and we tried to imitate them. That was how you passed a call.

I became an expert at aloof uncaring calls, for the cynical crew chiefs who were tired of being compassionate towards people who just wanted someone to care about them for a few minutes. I also became an expert at the only-ask-enough-questions-so-that-you-know-where-to-send-them call. The ask-every-possibly-relevant-question call was always the most difficult because there was always something that the impartial observer could remember to ask that you forgot because you were asking all the other questions.

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Ruby had passed all three of her calls already and was starting scenarios. They were basically the last tests before you advanced to the next rank. She was overjoyed, making sure that everyone knew she was going to be the first in our class to rank up. She ignored the fact that she had passed three of the same call with the same crew chief, not the most challenging feat. The impressive part was getting three of the same call with the same crew chief. I started taking more and more duty to compete with her. I wanted to be accepted by them, just as she had been.

Sandy had been starting rumors that people were going to pass us because they wanted to sleep with us and that any advancement we achieved would be just like what had happened before. We were nothing like the member who had manipulated her way to the top. It left me feeling empty of drive. I knew, no matter what, she would attribute my advancement to the aid of one of the guys in the organization. She called herself a feminist, but she was more the old school feminist, the “I’m special among women because I have a brain” type of feminism that just wasn’t relevant anymore. We were at an incredible university. Obviously, we had brains. Why not treat us like normal human beings?