Rant 1.0.2
Easy Goes Hard
The world of EMS can be trying, even stressful. This is especially true when you are working a truck that dedicated to providing 911 coverage; ask anyone on Boston EMS. You tend to go non-stop for hours on end dealing with people who are having anywhere from a bad day to the worst day of their lives. It wears on you after awhile.
EMS also has a not so stressful side; transfers. Transfer work is the easy stuff. You go to the hospital and pick a patient to go to another hospital, or if they are being discharged, home. These patients may be unruley, rude, or even assholes. They are not however in a state that can be called 'worst day ever'. Bad day sure, they are after all in a hospital, but no where near a hellish day. Transfers are easy.
So why the fuck is it that people can't do this job right?
I mean seriously folks! This type of EMS work is exactly as hard as you make it. You go to the floor. You look over some paperwork. You copy said paperwork onto your paperwork. You get the nurse to sign a piece of paper. You put the patient onto your strecher. You take them to where they're going. You drop them off. You clean your truck if it needs it, and you're done. Fucking simple. Monkey pressing the button simple. Yet every day people screw this shit up.
1) Crews forget to take the paperwork with them from the hospital; you know- the patient information that always go with someone to the next place so the next doctor can know what's going on. Then the crew whines when they have to go back and get it. Suck it up! You fucked up deal with it. If I forget to do something I don't say 'But why can't someone else do it? I just had to work.'.
2) Speaking of that, when you're at work you have to work! EMS is about the only job I've ever found where you can almost always count on several hours of downtime during a day when you're working on a transfer truck. That's time to sleep, read a book, go shopping for someone's birthday, or if it's the holiday season of your given denominational festivity shopping for that. So if, by some chance, you end up actually having to work for the full eight to sixteen hours of your shift DEAL WITH IT! People in office jobs can't just decided to get pissy because they didn't get to go shopping in the middle of the day while they were at work. If they do go shopping, they get fired! So don't bitch when you're asked to work at work!
3) And then there are the little things, like cleaning your truck. You're going to be living in that truck for eight or more hours when you're work, so why the hell do you leave it a mess? If you like living in flith, and I have nothing against that, do it on your own time. People don't want to get into an ambulance that looks like a twenty-something single male's loft apartment. While those places are fun to party at, not so much when you're ill and either going to or coming from a hospital. Clean is nice. Clean means the patient won't get another infection that will land them back in the hospital. And since every hospital and nursing home has a) trash bins for your waste, b) biohazard dump spots for your medical waste and c) cleaning products to sanitize your ambulance, there is no reason why dispatchers should be getting calls from angry managers who get calls from pissed off hospitals about trucks being fiilthy. It only happens when someone is FUCKING LAZY!
4) As for refusing calls, go fuck yourself. There are a grand total of 2 times you should refuse a call; you're at the ass end of a 24hr shift and it's almost quitting time (say 45 minutes till shift ends) and a dispatcher gives you a call that will take over two hours, or you and your partner are of the same gender and you're taking a crazy person that has issues with said gender. Other than those reasons, shut the fuck up, you're at work, do the call. If you're dumb enough to makes plans that start right when you get out of work in the EMS field then either you're really new or you're fucking stupid. This job has built in overtime because a call that's given to you at 4:30 when your shift ends at 6:00 may go late. In fact it will. So knowing this (I was told about this reality about ten minutes after I punched in for my first shift) why in God's Holy Name would you make plans at 6:00 that night when you get out at 6:00! And then use that to refuse a call?! This goes back to the whole doing work while you're work thing. Stop being lazy, you make more than minimum wage, and you chose to do this.
5) Lastly is the petty shit people pull when they're angry about being forced not to be lazy. Just because you didn't get you two hour nap at work is no reason to get pissy and make everyone else's life suck by not doing your job. Being surly to the nurses on floors, to the other crews, to the dispatchers (which is just stupid since they decided how much work you do) and to the patients is fucking retarded. That's right retarded; as in slow. As in 'if you do this and can't see how it affects everyone else you're slow on the uptake'; retarded. If you just did the calls and got them done, you would have some free time to relax. But since you're in a mood and taking it out on everyone else, you're day and everyone else's day just became longer. Congratulations Captian Asshole!
This applies to the portion of the EMS community that works only on Transfers. People who see the blood, guts, near death and death daily have the right to be cranky; it's why they burn out. But the people who work in the expensive taxi service side of the community need to grow up and stop being 20-30-40 and 50 year old babies.
This is only as tough a job as you make it.