He leaves again.

Well. The police department is first on the list.

He's directed to the practice exam website.

Well! If he's a complete failure at it he'll feel very silly about all the agonizing he's been doing. What is on this practice exam?

Questions of legal procedure, the org structure of the police department, service weapon facts, obligations to report, basic academics - there's a way to upload school records but he doesn't have those in a format they'll use - navigation in a map of Dashoe, facial recognition, memory and observation of short videos or images referenced later in the tests, judgment calls in various hypotheticals, and some of the obvious gimmes about whether you should sexually harass your coworkers or beat up your arrestees or take bribes or swipe confiscated items or do other malfeasance.

It hadn't occurred to him to study their weaponry in advance and also he maybe kind of on an emotional level expects typing any relevant search terms into Citrus to get his whole family killed.

But - he's been paying attention to the org structure (albeit from the kind of slant perspective "who needs to be in favor of what kinds of things to make them happen and what's the best angle discernible from their internet presence and job description?") and to the laws and policies that at least supposedly govern police behavior, he's sort of well-educated in general (a couple years ago he thought he wanted to be yellow and the process of discovering that he really didn't involved a lot of self-study), he has a great memory, and he is not somehow under the impression that anyone anywhere wants their employees to admit to taking bribes.

He scores a 77%; there are practice materials available to shore up the spots he's weaker on.

Good study habits include breaks. That gets interspersed with chores and - the next thing to look into (according to a byzantine ordering taking into account lead time and caste and coolness and likelihood of being turned down) is whether training for emergency services dispatch can be done remotely and whether the training requires some kind of application or just the work.

That's another thing there are practice tests for, though the test is not the only thing you need to get a job at dispatch.

Practice practice. Test test. There are only so many hours in a day to obsess over clean (!) jobs that he could do (!) in a season (!) and he hasn’t prioritized obsessing over this one.

The tests are mostly about what he says into a speech recognition app and how quickly and comprehensibly he does it in response to sample prompt calls and how quickly he can push the correct dispatch buttons in response to sample prompt texts and alerts. It's sort of like a video game except it has audio of people hysterically pretending that their baby isn't breathing or their factory is on fire.

He’s good at all those things for not particularly having trained at them, and not thrown at all by the distressingness of the scenarios.

Then he'll perform pretty well on the dispatcher training video game!

He’s so pleased. He hugs his stuffed axolotl about it and then does another chunk of studying police weaponry and then comes back to - what's next with emergency dispatch?

They want a resume, of course, and usually do interviews to check things like conscientiousness.

In hindsight, there are some things that maybe could have been a higher priority than making sure he had topics picked out for smalltalk with purples.

Maybe the internet knows how to write a resume that somehow doesn’t disgust the cleans?

There is an enormous amount of handwringing over this. It seems very difficult. Lying on a resume is not illegal, but it does mean that you are later subject to a lot of reprisals that honest-resume hires are legally protected from.

He's not going to lie to them! Not for a job that's - it's hard to articulate what exactly makes a job where he wouldn't be willing to lie. This one's a job where people would be placing their lives in his hands, so many people, over and over again, because they trust - not him personally but the people and the systems that decide whom to hire, and him a little bit by extension. Police work is less like that - a lot of the time police are instead interacting with people who were trying very hard not to interact with them - but the Danshoe Police Department's policies are the closest he's going to get to an extended hand. He can imagine lying to get a job washing windows, but he's not aiming for that.

But is there at least some kind of consensus on whether it's worse to go into detail about how driving a garbage truck has given him the opportunity to practice things relevant to the jobs he's applying for, or to be brief, or to just say he's driven a truck and that's all, or just say he hasn't actually done grey work before? Surely every day someone somewhere is getting their first grey job and for most of them it's their first job, period.

If there isn't a clear consensus about it on the internet he's inclined to go with the last thing for dispatch but go into more detail for the police department, which is openly interested in considering ex-red applicants and probably wants to know that he can drive.

Nobody on the internet confidently pushes a different strategy.

He proceeds with that plan. Dispatch first because it’s faster and easier to skip the part where he figures out how to describe his work history, and because he wants to squeeze in a little more time spent studying the things he needs to know to be a cop.

His résumé comes off like he played madlibs with a template for greys fresh out of school (because he did), though the dates make it clear he's been out of school for years. His cover letter leaves it at "I haven't had a grey job before" and he lists as a reference one of the other mods of the aquarium hobbyist forum he moderates. (He thinks they might be under the impression that he's yellow, but he's never said and doesn't think they'll be stunned to hear he's looking for a grey job, he's never claimed he wasn't grey.)

He has a good enough score that someone will in fact contact his references.

For what it’s worth his internet friend hasn’t gotten the impression that he’s wildly corrupt or irresponsible.

(Meanwhile he goes to work and then spends some time figuring out if there’s an easy way to improve on the first résumé template he found.)

One city calls him up to see if he sounds red on the phone, as that would be a pretty serious drawback for a dispatcher.

He has been practicing to not sound red for years. He does not sound red on the phone. He sounds like maybe a grey who talks to a lot of yellows, or the other way around. (He thought it through a while back and decided he was about eighty percent sure he could pull off just uncomplicatedly sounding like he was born grey, and much more sure in a limited context like this, but if he did aim for that and get it wrong it'd be very obvious. This way maybe gives a little cover if he does make a mistake - maybe it's an obscure yellow thing, maybe it's an obscure grey thing, it's less likely that any individual listener has quite enough context to know what to expect.)

Oh great, that is basically the exact voice type they like for dispatch. "We're burning temps pretty fast right now," says the interviewer. "Your available start date is later than convenient for us but even if we do make a permanent hire between now and then we can probably still use you then."