The Crazy Quilt of 911 Calls and the Voices Who Answer : ‘Kojak’ calls with false reports of espionage, while ‘Cat Lady’ enjoys chatting about her cat’s play habits.

“Laser Lady” repeatedly dials 911 to report the same problem: Her pesky neighbors keep trying to shoot laser beams at her head. Could the operators please send someone out to put up protective shields?

This day she was calling from a beauty parlor. Although she was wearing a tin foil helmet “for defense purposes,” the perm solution applied by the beautician was posing an ominous threat to her well-being. “Please,” she begged the 911 operator, “put the shields up.” Good-naturedly, the operator assured her they would be raised immediately.

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As the unseen voices of calm in a chaotic city, police service representatives who answer 911 calls for the Los Angeles Police Department are unfazed by the Laser Ladies of the world. After all, in this job, such calls are frequent.

“It’s weird,” says emergency operator Eddie Calderon, “but this is Los Angeles.”

Twenty-four hours a day, the calls flood in from 18 geographic regions and four traffic divisions across the city.

They end up in the bowels of City Hall East, four floors underground in a bomb shelter that serves as the headquarters for the Communications Division. “It’s kinda like ‘Get Smart,’ ” muses emergency operator Elaine Owens. “You go through all these doors . . . and you end up at a phone.”

The calls range from the tragic to the absurd. In an average 24-hour period, the division will answer nearly 14,000 calls.

There have been calls to report loud birds, broken toasters and failed relationships. Then there are the kids. “We can tell you what time the kids get out of school, because they go down the street and dial 911 from every pay phone,” says senior police service representative Spencer Leafdale.

On a recent night, a preteen boy called with a request: He wanted a date. Unhindered by shyness, he described exactly what would happen if the operator were to join him. All the while, his address was lit up on her computer screen.

“You want a cop to come visit you, little man?” she asked.

The boy hung up.

“We get these calls all the time,” the emergency operator said matter-of-factly.

It is the “5150s,” the division moniker for the mentally ill, that become the stuff of legend within the department. A man they dub “Kojak” calls with false reports of espionage, while “Cat Lady” enjoys chatting about her cat’s play habits. “Singing Sam the Harmonica Man,” now deceased, often called to play his soul harp and sing the blues.

“It’s unfortunate that crazy calls load the system down, but on the other hand, it can be entertaining. It breaks up the evening,” Owens says.

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The backgrounds of these emergency operators are as diverse as the calls they field, from a former prison guard to ex-air traffic controllers. Many, like Owens, come from telephone companies.

All must survive six months of training before actually “killing a red light”--divisionspeak for answering a 911 call. Among other things, there are lessons on the penal code, which are necessary for deciding which calls get priority. To know the difference between a robbery and a burglary, for example, is crucial.

Each day brings stories of tragedy: murders, rapes, robberies, domestic violence. Often the events are being played out as calls are in progress.

Still, the emergency operators make it a rule to remain detached.

Eileen Stuart, a former prison guard who has been with the department since 1981, recalls the night a woman threatened suicide.

“She was just jerking my heart out,” Stuart said. “I wanted to cry with her but I couldn’t do that. If I let go, she would let go. Some of the calls . . . you have to stay stable. And others, you have to drag them into your life to keep them hanging on.”

Officer Jimmy Jones says operators are constantly asking for a manual that will “tell how to handle calls, and I keep trying to point out that if we had a book that was taller than this building, a call would come in that wasn’t in the book.”

When a woman called complaining of a headache and kept babbling about fish that were swimming around her, the operator who answered the call heeded the division mantra of “when in doubt, send it out.” A police car was dispatched.

“Everyone thought she was totally 5150,” recalls Jones. But the operator’s hunch was correct. The woman had been robbed and hit over the head with her fishbowl.

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All of this, of course, creates stress. So the department set up an in-house peer counseling group and provides a staff psychologist. When a call is particularly difficult--such as an “officer down” call, a child in danger or a woman attacked by her husband as she’s calling to report spousal abuse--the emergency operators are allowed to leave the board to collect their thoughts.

During regular breaks, they hawk Avon products, fiddle with electronic poker games and read paperbacks--just about anything they can do to get some peace of mind. Calderon draws cartoons that are reflections of the silly calls he often receives. Others march up to the City Hall helipad for a smoke, or to the 18th floor for a brisk walk.

Some have less conventional forms of coping.

“Driving home over the Cahuenga Pass, you roll down the window and you scream at the top of your lungs,” Stuart said. “Let it all out. It’s called stress therapy, and it works.”