Adrenaline Dump

It might have just been too much coffee on my part, but I think it caught everybody else too. You could smell the adrenaline flowing around the camp like ozone, it was so thick.

Here's the setup: We'd had a bad count followed by a good count, which put us all behind. We had to send all of our workers back to their houses for the recount and chow was late and everybody was a little edgy.

When count finally cleared, there was radio traffic all over with everybody trying to return the workers and get things caught back up.

All of the sudden we hear a female voice, sounding kind of excited saying "Garble garble A-wing!"

And everything went quiet.

And all of us stopped what we were doing and went outside, waiting to see if we needed to run somewhere or go back inside and start some paperwork.

I looked around and we already had Screech in our house so I knew it wasn't her that time.

Somebody said "10-9?" Meaning of course "Please repeat?"

Nothing.

The Control center repeated it more formally: "Last transmitting radio unit- 10-9 your last transmission?"

Nothing.

So we started doing a radio check to make sure everyone was okay. Went through the whole list one at a time.

Turns out everybody was okay and nothing was going on. I suspect that someone just sat on their radio at the wrong time and then was too embarrassed to admit it.

But it sure made my black flabby little heart go pitty-pat there for a second. We have been lucky for so long without a serious incident on our shift that I think we are due.

It sure had me going. And coming down off one of those adrenaline dumps really really sucks.