09 November 2005

District not-so familiarization

The firehouse has been rather slow today. We basically sat around and talked for the past few hours. Now we have our weekly company meeting (shift meeting). Today is black shift ( my assigned company) so we had a short meeting and then decided on training to do for the evening. We decided on district familiarization. We went through the map book and also talked about some recent (and not so recent) calls that we had trouble finding the address to. We ended up with about 15 roads/addresses that we would familiarize ourselves with tonight. Since I was on day crew (until 2000), I was assigned to the ambulance with two guys and we set off. I am relatively new to the area up here as it is, but there has also been a lot of new construction that the other guys weren't really familiar with either.

Needless to say, in our ventures to find the addresses and roads we did end up in some not-so-friendly neighborhoods. Well, actually, they may have been perfectly nice to be honest, but it was dark and windy out and I wasn't real fond of spotting my partner out of all the dead end streets we got ourselves into. I was just waiting for an animal to run out in front of me or hear sticks breaking in the woods...It would have been all over. I would have high-tailed it out of there without looking back. All in all the training went pretty well.

We found many of our repeater roads that dead end every few blocks. You know, the ones that you can see right through the little patch of trees to the other side where it starts up again but you can't get the damn rig through it. I guess that's why we did this drill so that we will known for the future where theses roads are and how to figure out which of the 8 Logan Courts the rescue/fire call is truly on. It wouldn't be the first time I'd look like a complete jackass turning around in a parking lot with my lights on and my siren blaring, just to realize I was going the right way in the first place. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That's when I wish I would have just gone on a nice code one where only half the neighborhood would notice instead of the entire town. Oh well. You have to be good at something I suppose.

We got back from training around 2100. I'm still beat from yesterday, so I plan on calling it an early night in preparation for my butt crack of dawn off time of 0500.

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