9-1-1, it's what I do.

I decided to start this new blog to include a more specific subject matter than can be found at Wight Wing Wadical, specifically my job. Not everyone cares about what I do for a living or wants to hear me bitch about it. Many people may not even understand. Hell, most people probably won’t understand. Some of it I don’t understand. Complaining about work at work is most unadvisable. Therefore, most people must seek out a place to do so because bottling it in is even more unadvisable. This medium seems ideal, so I’ve chosen this place to put my thoughts in writing.

I happen to find it healthy to be able to sit and reflect on the tragedy I’m exposed to everyday. Reflection is impossible to do while immersed in the daily stressors of public safety work but it is necessary to either make sense of it all or at least file it away in some orderly fashion. Lack of reflection will lead to a callusing of the senses…not the same as the desensitization that is essential to being effective at intervening in an emergency, but rather a hardening of the heart and emotions that make us human, the very things that separate us from the lowlifes that we have daily contact with and come to despise.

Those in this business have a tendency to judge people by looking at them through the same lenses as they do the vile, drunk, seedy, perverted, belligerent, violent, crazy, hysterical, sometimes downright evil element of society that we are exposed to everyday. Unfortunately for us, it is these types of people that either need our services or cause others to need our services most often. However, we must treat everyone the same. Sinners and saints are supposed to receive the same level of service. We are forced to automatically equalize everyone in order to provide the level of service that the public expects. Turning that particular area of yourself off when you leave work often proves more difficult than one might imagine. Burnout is common. Change in personality is inevitable. Divorce rate is high, clinical depression is rampant, and alienating one’s self from everyone including loved ones is an unintended but often unavoidable side effect of a life spent serving others.

The inability to talk about the things that we see, hear and feel with those we love is due, in part, to the often correct presumption that they will not understand. There is also an underlying desire to protect them from those extremely low levels of society that we so often encounter. It is common to entrust these reflections only to those who do the same thing we do day in and day out. Cops tend to gravitate to other cops, Firefighters to Firefighters, and the same with EMT’s, Paramedics and 911 dispatchers. That natural gravitation often causes an “us against them” distrust of other specialized public safety professionals. That “inter-service rivalry”, as it is sometimes referred to, is not spoken of very often outside of the small circles we’ve come to trust. But it is there, and any public safety professional who denies it is just a rookie and will be properly indoctrinated soon enough.

So it is here, that I will attempt to dissuade myself from taking on the unhealthy characteristics of the burnouts and assholes that so often make up the veterans of Public Safety. Not all posts will be negative. I will bitch when bitching is necessary. That may be pretty often but I will attempt to include those things that make this job worth doing as well. Perhaps by doing so, I can maintain some sense of individuality, keep hold of my own personality and sanity and continue to be the person that my family and friends love. Perhaps by putting these things in writing, I will be able to keep from alienating myself from those who are most important to me. There is an advantage to composing one’s thoughts in writing. You can’t backspace and edit in a conversation. You can’t take back what you’ve said, but a composition always comes out just right.

My name is Jason, and this is what I do.