Reserves that Don’t Like to Work

This morning I made sure to get in and do my legs workout. Because of the physical agility test on Saturday and the fact that I don’t want tired legs going into it I will not do another legs workout this week.

After the workout I did some work on the reserve time log. We are going to standardize the time log to be more like the career OT time log. I wanted to have my input used in making it.

I also was asked to help out with some videos for training tonight. I was trying to help Wehrung download some, but that was no use, so I just had him link to them using favorites.

We had our training. It was firefighter standdown week. So we spent time going over safety information and looking over our protective equipment to get it repaired if there are any problems with it.

After the meeting Brown, Chapman, and I started to talk about training. Soon that went into a discussion about the reserves and their lack of willingness to do anything more than the minimum. They don’t like to pick up events nor extra shifts. They don’t come down on daytime calls and they don’t usually have their pagers on at night in case of a second alarm. It is pretty pathetic at times the turn out we get from the reserves when a second alarm hits. That is one of the big reasons why we exist. If we don’t start to show our worth they may decide they don’t need us.

I was on call running the engine with Chapman. We had one fire alarm call come in around midnight. Just before the call came out I got an e-mail from one of my guys asking for a night off because there is a streak where four out of five nights we will be doing something. That was an eyebrow raising request in light of the conversation we just had. I told Chapman about it because the timing of the e-mail was incredible.