Chapter 5 — Calls are not allowed to be hung up

Five years ago, on a hot April night, the ceiling fan in the duty room had a broken blade and made a screeching sound with each rotation. Dan was then twenty-six years old, three years into the job, still sitting at desk number nine, close to the window, the only thing that distinguished her from the other operators was her fastest typing speed in the group and her habit of always keeping a pencil tucked behind her ear even though she never used it.

— Operator, listen here.

— Sister... please...

The woman's voice, about thirty years old, trembled but she tried to say each word clearly as if she was trying her best not to burst into tears mid-sentence.

— I heard you, just say, what are you facing?

— My husband... he's drunk... he's breaking things...

— Are you injured?

— No, no, I hid in the bathroom, but I was afraid he would break the door...

Dan then quickly typed the initial information, her hands shaking slightly but her voice still trying to keep steady, an instinct she learned from training sessions with Anh Tuyet just a few months before.

— Can you give me your home address?

— I live... on the street...

There was a loud banging on the door, the sound of wood cracking, and the sound of a man roaring something incomprehensible. The woman's voice choked and whispered urgently:

— He's here, I have to hang up...

— Don't hang up, just leave the phone on, it's okay if you don't hear me, just leave it on...

The line is turned off. Dan didn't immediately panic, she still had the naive belief of someone with three years of experience that the system would locate in time, that she just needed to follow the next steps correctly and everything would be fine. She called back, no one picked up. She reported to the team leader at that time, a man with a different name who had long since transferred jobs. He looked at the little information she had, just a conversation less than a minute, no address, no name, and told her to just report to the police in the nearby area to try, even though he himself was not sure which area was correct.

The navigation system at that time was much more rudimentary than it is now, the error could be up to more than a kilometer in densely populated areas. Dan spent the next forty minutes frantically calling every police station within the suspect radius, describing every smallest detail she remembered from the short conversation: the voice, the sound of banging on the door, a sentence that passed by her ear that she only later realized was important, something "road" that was interrupted midway.

During those forty-two minutes, Dan did not leave the duty desk even though her shift should have ended fifteen minutes ago. She remembered standing up exactly once, to get a glass of water and then sitting down again, afraid that if she left the table for even thirty seconds, a response call from one of the police stations she had contacted would come in just as her table was empty. She remembered how cold her hands were despite the hot April weather, and remembered the sound of the ceiling fan screeching with each revolution like a countdown clock that no one could control.

Forty-two minutes after the first call, a police patrol unit accidentally received a report from a neighbor about loud noise at a house on extended Bach Dang Street, not far from the city center. They rushed in and broke the door. The woman named To Diem Thuy was lying motionless on the bathroom floor. She was taken to the emergency room immediately, but it was too late to get to the hospital. Later, investigation records recorded: if the authorities had approached about twelve minutes earlier, it was possible that she could have been saved.

That news came to Dan not through an official report, but through a brief internal call from the on-duty coordinator the next night, who only said one sentence before hanging up because he was busy handling another case: "The incident on Bach Dang Street last night, the person did not survive." Dan remembers sitting quietly in front of the turned off computer screen for nearly an hour after those words, not crying, not saying anything, just sitting still as if her body needed time to believe what her ears had just heard.

Her husband, a man named Su Dac Toan, was arrested at the scene, then sentenced to many years in prison for intentionally causing injury leading to death. The case was closed on paper in less than a year. But for Dan, it never really ends.

She once read a few lines in the local news reporting the trial, including one detail that made her remember forever: neighbors said that for many months before that fateful night, they had heard arguing coming from the house, but no one called to report it because they thought it was "the couple's private matter". Those words engraved in Dan's mind a question she carried with her throughout eight years of working: how many cries for help were ignored just because the person who heard them didn't believe it was their story.

Over the next several months, she listened to the recording of that call dozens of times, trying to find some detail she had missed, some question she should have asked sooner, some way she could have done it differently to shorten those forty-two minutes to thirty, twenty, ten minutes. She couldn't find any clear answer, because the truth was simple and brutal: with what little information she had at her disposal that night, she had followed every step of the process correctly. The problem was not with the process. The problem was that sometimes the right procedure was not fast enough to save a life.

To Diem Thuy's funeral took place on a light rainy morning. Dan was not allowed to attend in an official capacity, because the emergency center had no regulations allowing operators to contact relatives of the deceased in such incidents. She just stood from afar, on the other side of the street opposite the cemetery, watching the group of people wearing mourning clothes quietly walk through the gate, and promised herself something she had never said out loud to anyone: she would never let a call like this end in silence just because of the lack of a question she was afraid to ask.

From then on, every time he received a vague, short call, showing signs that the caller was afraid of something right in their own home, Dan spent extra time, asked more questions, and stayed on the line longer than necessary according to average statistics. One time it saved a life. One time that only resulted in a stray cat entering an empty apartment. But she never, not even once, regretted asking one more question.

The price of that habit is the comments in the annual evaluation file: "sometimes reacting more than necessary compared to available information", "need to consider average call handling performance". None of the people who wrote those reviews knew about that April night, about the screeching sound of the ceiling fan, about the voice that was interrupted midway through the word "sugar". Only Anh Tuyet, who at that time was the leader of the day shift but heard the story through Dan's choked words one morning when the two of them were on duty together, knew all the details.

At that time, Anh Tuyet did not say many empty words of comfort. She just made Dan a cup of ginger tea, sat next to her in the break room between shifts for nearly half an hour without saying anything, then before returning to the duty desk, she left a sentence that Dan still remembers verbatim to this day: "This profession does not allow you to atone for your mistakes by forgetting. It only allows you to atone for your mistakes by doing better on the next call, even though that next call has nothing to do with the person who died." That sentence became something Dan clung to every time the feeling of helplessness from that April night threatened to return.

Dan never told Vuong Dac Long the full story. He only knew through records, through brief reviews, through the perspective of a manager who needs to balance sympathy and responsibility for operating a system that serves millions of calls each year. Perhaps that is also the reason why two people, despite having a similar professional wound, stand on opposite sides every time an ambiguous call appears: one is afraid of acting too late, the other is afraid of acting too hastily.

Tonight, standing in the middle of the dark hallway after his meeting with Long, Dan let that memory pass completely once, not stopping it as usual. She let herself remember everything, from the hum of the ceiling fan to the forty-two minutes of silence, then she took a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and walked back to her desk, where another child, another night, was waiting for her not to miss another chance.