I haven’t really made any updates because training hasn’t changed all that much. I’m still in fire academy, learning geographical boundaries, commands, medic assignments, and things like that, but my trainer has been prepping me for call receiver training in the somewhat fuzzy future. We’ve been doing lots of mock calls, helping me lock down my call types and priorities, get me into the habit of using abbreviations and the police phonetic alphabet, and remember the things that must be done each and every time!
So far, I’m batting .285, but this week has been a big improvement and while I felt frustrated last week, I saw steady progress as we worked.
On the downside, the new trainer meant a new shift, 0100-1100, which is not awesome. On the other hand, my new trainer really knows her stuff and is awesome.
I’m taking the good with the bad.
I don’t know how long I’ll be in fire academy. I still need to take at least the criteria-based dispatch course before I can go on to call receiver training and from the rumbles I heard this week, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least four weeks away. I’m not really complaining, though, because the time spent honing these fundamentals will pay off big time in the future. Particularly mastering addressing. That’s easily our number one data point. We can fudge a lot of other things, but we can’t do anything if we don’t know where you are. I spent many hours this week trying to locate addresses in our different CAD systems, learning to minimize my query to maximize success, and just how we get to someone somewhere on a freeway. It’s not easy and it’ll be my biggest challenge in call receiver training.
I’m still eager to get into it, though.
I’m also listening to live calls and practicing my note-taking skills, which has exposed me to a whole new level of life. The mental/emotional cases who rage at anything or sound completely calm and lucid as they talk about the aliens doing things to their property. I heard a man in pain after getting shot a whole bunch of times (I think he lived, though). I learned that a call for a chaplain was never a good sign and neither is calling off the CPR timer if we’re not immediately transporting a patient. I listened to a young man who’d eaten a THC edible terrified and uncertain if he was alive or not, vacillating between outrageous statements to simple questions.
They all called. Most of them lived. Our job is to help them all to the best of our ability. Looking at my colleagues, professionals all, I know I’m in the right place. Nobody slacks off.
911 Dispatches 