Bringing me down to Earth

I went to my house and did some laundry today. I needed to get some things washed as I was nearly out of clothing items to wear. While I was there I relaxed a little bit. It was very nice.

I was on call though so I had to be back in Pullman by around six o’clock pm. I got changed and went to the station to do some maintenance. Chuck and I were talking about several different things. One of which was about the position of Crew Leader. It is one of those position that we will probably be losing soon and I don’t know if I will be asked to move up or not. Being that I am not an engineer I have a feeling they will not ask me to move up. But if they do I don’t know if I would want to accept it. I like running Rescue calls and I have a feeling as a crew leader those days would be pretty much over. That is not a change I am ready to make at this time.

While talking about that we were talking about a few other things when James came over. I asked him about a log book for Reserves to track things the way we use it. It is one of those things that has changed since our station had full-timers added to it. He said we would have to send that request up the chain-of-command and that if I were just to get a log book so we could start to do that, it could cause problems.

Then we were talking about rig staffing. If we have five people on we would put two on rescue and three on the engine. Which to most of us in the trenches did not make sense. We have way more EMS calls that fire calls. By having a third on rescue we can still be in service if one of us gets in the ambulance. Also for labor intensive calls like extrications we have more manpower. But they want the third on engine so if there is a call outside of the city or we are out somewhere and a fire comes in then we have more people on the engine. I told James what my concerns were. Then he told me that extrication is not a real priority to the department.

He mentioned that we don’t take the extrication tools off of rescue when it goes in for maintenance. Also that there is no guaranteed response of rescue during the day. So for many years I view extrication as a thing at the department they saved for reserves to do. That was our baby. But now I see it is just that it is not something of great importance. So I was feeling sort of crappy about that. The one thing I thought made us important, is not quiet as important as I thought it was.