Saturday night--my last full night of being on call.

1:45am the phone rings. "Hi, this is the radio room. We have a signal 100F out on... oh wait, I've just been informed that it's not a 100...it's a 30."

A 100F is a hit and run fatality. A 30 is a homicide.

I pulled on my long johns, threw on my uniform, and by 2:15 I was looking down at a bullet-riddled corpse. (Okay, it wasn't exactly bullet riddled. It was only 3 bullet holes. Just how many holes would constitute "riddled?")

See, now, on CSI I would have been wearing high heels, full makeup, some sort of stylish coat, and I would have hot coffee at hand. Instead, I was bundled up in very non-glamorous garb, (thanking all the gods that I'd bought longies earlier in the day!) wearing essentially no makeup, had my only partially-combed hair pulled back in an awkward ponytail, and I was unshowered (I slapped some deodorant on and brushed my teeth, for the sake of my teammates). Oh, and my nose was running like a faucet and I had half a dozen used kleenex stuffed into my pockets.

The victim was lying on the side of the road, and had been discovered by a deputy on patrol. In fact, the first time he'd passed it he'd thought it was just a pile of debris. (There's still debris everywhere from the storm.) But when he came back he realized it was a person. Then, it was first thought that he'd been hit by a car, but then the deputies on scene saw the bullet casings, and that pretty much changed everything.

I was on the scene from 2am until 10am, then I spent another hour taking the evidence I'd collected to the lab and securing it. CSI doesn't show how exhausted the techs get, or how grungy. They don't show the female techs dealing with the very real problem of having to find a place to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night in a residential neighborhood when there are no businesses open. (Another pain-in-the-ass side-effect of the storm: Nothing is open at night. ) Fortunately the PD's HQ was not too far away, so the female techs all piled into a car and made a quick trip there while we were waiting for the coroner. We were all starving by 4 am, and we had to wait until 6 for anything to open. CSI also doesn't show everyone standing around doing nothing (except for trying to stay awake) while someone is off writing a search warrant for a house nearby. I think four hours of our scene time was spent just waiting. We utilized that time to make another potty run, and then go to the now-open McDonalds and get food for all the crime scene folks.

Everyone in the lab agrees that my call week has been utterly insane. I told them that it wasn't safe for me to be on call again. Too many people die! My bodycount for the week is 4. Two naturals, one accidental, and one homicide. And then I also had two business burglaries, and five car burglaries. I'm going to be writing reports until the end of the year. (Yeah, they don't show all the friggin paperwork on CSI either.)

I now have four hours left of my call week. I'm not going to relax until 12:01.