07/20/06 - Yet another activity update.
08/10/05 - Just another update to keep this pointless site active.
01/22/05 - Just updating to keep my site here active.
06/04/04 - My other site where I actually update things: Livejournal Blog
01/12/04 - Nearly a year since I've played around on this site. Still not firefighting, still bitter about TVF&R. So the page is 'Rant with Chris', where's the rants? I don't have any major rants at the moment I feel like kvetching about here, mostly it's a laziness issue.
03/10/03 - What to do, what to do? Here I have all this great Geocities web
space doing nothing. Perhaps I should start a web log? A quasi-blog? Maybe just
post reviews of all the wonderful cheeses available for human consumption? I'm
just not sure so for now I'll just throw whatever I feel like up on this site.
I'll be surprise if I get more than one or two hits a month other than people
looking for the LCVFD.
So why no LCVFD page? Well, I no longer live in League City nor in Texas. I
currently hang my (Gore-Tex) hat in Portland, Oregon (for you Texans visiting -
Ore-y-gun). I've been out here for almost 2 years now.
I did try volunteering for the local fire district, Tualatin Valley Fire and
Rescue, but it's not what I want to do - they appear to be a great department to
work for but as far as I'm concerned volunteering for them leaves much to be
desired. Basically they want career firefighters for free - I can understand the
need to have people at the same level so you can swap crews, but over 90% of the
time the volunteers don't respond to the fire until it's out and they provide
rehab and overhaul. And there are a lot of attitudes with the vols.
Because I
came from a vol. department in Texas everyone assumes it's the Bumpkinville VFD
- not realizing that LCVFD had 4 stations, 90 members, 11 apparatus and covered
60k citizens in 55+ square miles. The personal level isn't there either - when
they say volunteer company it's mostly like that - a company, all business, no
fun. I did their combat lateral academy for 2 days, two 8 hour days with a lot
of loading and unloading hose, after being out of fire work for a year it was
very hard on me and even harder come Monday morning. I had no fun and that's a
big factor - if I don't have even a little fun it's not worth doing for free. I
moved over to their 'non-combat' side, this is supposed to proved support such
as rehab (which the 'combat' vols. already do) and tender driver (that's a water
tanker). I waited and waited and then waited some more, finally some classes
were provided - and a few pagers but not enough for all. This was August, I
continued to wait for more information and a pager, I finally received a pager
in late December.
The first call I respond to was a commercial fire, I don't
have any gear at all because none was provided short of a TVFR jacket/shirt, so
I stayed out of the 'hot zone' moving air bottles back and forth then helped the
career crew load hose - pretty helpful I'd say to get them back in service
quick. Next day there is an email saying non-combats are NOT to respond to calls
(caveat - this only applies to Aloha station 362 volunteers - not to any of the
other 5 stations). I'm told it's not because of me riding on a call, it's
because they need to figure out a policy on how to respond. WTF? Why don't they
ask the guys at Sherwood 333 what they do as they have 2 non-combats who
respond. Oh wait, one of them used to be a combat firefighter with TVFR so guess
he is an exception?
By the time they get it figured out and say we can go on calls again it's into
late January and still no word on what I can actually do - even though I've
provided copies of all my training and certifications from Texas (Texas basic
volunteer) and bugged them about driving classes. I dropped by on a training
night to see what was going on, asked about a call they went on (a 'water
problem' call at a big hotel, which is a water removal call) and mentioned that
in LC we wouldn't have done a cleanup for that type of call - and I immediately
get a condescending reply "That's customer service, part of the chief's bulls
eye! (a customer service deally)" So the person took my comment all wrong, I was
just making a statement and it seemed to be turned around huff-like that 'we
don't do that here, Mr. Bumpkinville ex vollie'. So that pissed me off. Sorta
like saying you bought something at Target, and I reply 'We didn't have that at
K-mart' and instead of going 'oh, ok' you'd say 'well that's bad product
representation, you're stupid for going there'.
After that little experience I've just decided that TVFR does not care about
non-combat volunteers, there is poor interaction between the combat and
non-combat as well as with the career. And once again it wasn't any fun, it was
a chore to go do things for TVFR, so I'll just wait until I'm in a more rural
area where I can be involved in a tighter knit community based fire department
rather than a 'company' fire department.
Guess I found something to put on this page after all?
Dessi's Realm - Another pointless Chris page.
