How do you spell that again, homie?

I'm working the morning online shift today, in place of Jason, who's gallivanting off in Colombia at the moment with his lovely wife. Similar to the weekend shift, it's an alternately dreary and extraordinarily exciting task, with long, slow expanses of nothing punctuated with brief moments of action and/or comedy.

This morning was a glacially slow bit of nothin'. The fun stuff happened yesterday, the cops didn't have the reports in front of them, people weren't answering their phones. I was so dead from working too long yesterday, I called the wrong station-- twice-- to get info on a traffic collision that they weren't even vaguely involved in. I wasted some officer's time and felt bad about it.

The only saving grace, aside from the sheriff's watch deputy in Santa Clarita telling me "there's nothing interesting unless you're a fan of boredom," was this brief conversation with a Burbank lieutenant. He didn't have anything good, but he was reading a warrant report at the time where the suspect had given the investigator a phony name. That reminded him of a funny story of an encounter he had with a crook long ago:

"He tells me his name is Ulysses Greene and I say, ok, could you spell that? He's trying and he's just butchering it. So I tell him, if you're gonna lie, at least lie with a name you can spell, like Joe Smith. So then my favorite part is that he spells Green. G-r-e-e-n-e. The last e is silent, he tells me. So he can't spell his first name, but he knows his last name has a silent e. I thought that was pretty funny."

So did I, Lieutenant. I wish I'd been a little more coherent at the time to chortle along with you.