Addiction

I've become hooked on a few diversions of late. Fortunately they're nothing along the Robert Downey, Jr. lines of addictions. Mine are legal yet still more than likely killing off massive amounts of brain cells. One in particular has become a fairly prevalent time killer. Some months ago I found a web site that allows you to listen to various police and fire scanners. For the longest time I had been listening to the scanner for a neighboring county. For the most part it's pretty boring, a lot of traffic stops, routine calls to respond to home alarms that have gone off for whatever reason, and the occasional EMS dispatch (which can be interesting, including the time they were dispatched to a fire station for a guy who cut off a couple of his fingers and went there only to find the station empty, everyone off on a call).

Within the past six weeks the scanner for the town I live in finally came online, and I'm hooked on listening to it. Like the neighboring county, there are a lot of boring traffic stops and alarm calls, but it's interesting to hear the dispatches because I now know exactly what's going on in town. When I get on my laptop at home later in the evenings I often will go to the scanner page and start listening there using earphones so as to not bother anyone. I may need professional help to kick this addiction. But it's going to be hard, because as I write this I'm listening to transmissions from police and fire/rescue maybe half a mile from where I am at the moment about a dead black male floating face down in the river that runs through town. Now I'll fall prey to the gambler's fallacy that if I continue to listen in the future I'll hear something just as interesting.