One of the officers, B, strides into the watch room. The tell-tale bing-bong of the PA system sounds as he commands: “All hands to the mess in five minutes”. He’s a friendly bloke but not one you want to get on the wrong side of, and he is not happy. Four minutes later, we’re around the mess table.
“The way we’ve been working has been driving me up the wall, and I know it has for some of you too. We get everything essential like inventories, tests and visits done because they’re non-negotiables, but it’s all over the place, it’s not organised, and it takes forever.
“And where we’re not following through is on our training and our gym time. Sometimes we’re still doing visits at 6 and not eating until well gone 7. Shit’s getting kicked into the long grass because everything else is taking so long and it’s not working.”
D’s back is up as he thinks B is calling us lazy.
“The problem is the brigade crams the diary so bloody full it’s not humanly possible to get it all done. It’s like the diary, the training schedule, the number of visits, it’s all there to fill the days at some poxy station out in the sticks.
“But we regularly get over 10 shouts a day, we’re out all the time, we work like dogs and just about manage to get it all done. We only ever have the minimum riders, we’re constantly getting sent on out-duties, and the brigade is on its knees. It’s a joke.”
B agrees and assures us he’s not having a go at us or our work ethic, and he just wants to rationalise the schedule a bit so we aren’t trying to do five things at once and we can hopefully get everything done in good time to chill out and go to the gym before dinner.
We’re happy to give it a crack. It’s a busy station and shouts obviously take precedence, so naturally routine duties often take longer than would be ideal and push other things back, or off the agenda entirely. There’s nothing to be done about that. But it couldn’t hurt to be a bit more structured about it — anything that might help us fit a bit more drilling in is good with me as the last thing you want is to make a prat of yourself on the fireground.
Aftersome discussion, we set about devising a new daily diary. Silence descends briefly as we mull it over before the priority is made clear by a firefighter’s suggestion.
“Why don’t we set our mealtimes and work backwards from them”, he says. “If we know when we will be eating and when we need to start prep, we can fit everything around that. It’s like a car isn’t it, if you don’t put fuel in, it won’t go. And I’m one big fucking car.”
With that indisputable argument made, we planned out the rest of the day, cutting out the traditional tea ready for change of watch: that’s something from a bygone era and we were the only watch on station and probably one of the last few in the city still to adhere to it. We also decided, very ambitiously, to try and smash out both days’ worth of visits during the afternoon on day 1, ideally leaving second afternoon clear for practical training and drills.
We decide to review it in a few tours. It’s good B brought it to the watch and we decided on it collectively, rather than him and the officers making the decisions without the watch. But the experienced hands are sceptical. I turn to O as we walk back to the watch room.
“Do you reckon this will help?”
He looks at me. “With the best will in the world — not a fucking chance”.
Sure enough, in the following tour the plan on both days is ripped to shreds by shouts. Maybe next tour.
