When she told me that a certain service engineer wouldn't talk to her about problems with a laser until she got a male colleague to come over and repeat everything, AND I KNOW WHO THAT ENGINEER IS, well, that means it's Embarrassing Story Time.
I used to have that engineer come to my training classes, so I could have him roll up his shirtsleeve to display the four dime sized scars on his arm where a Quanta Ray had vaporized flesh as he pulled his arm though a beam.
LESSON: "Learn from Joe. Know where your beams are."
Joe very much resented being used as Living Training Prop but he'd fucked up enough times, that he was required to be my object lesson by his manager on threat of being fired with me to take his place as a service engineer.
That, obviously, didn't happen.
To be fair, my first reaction was "Jesus fucking christ, he's still alive? His liver should've give out over a decade ago."
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There's a hard philosophical conflict in emergency preparedness that goes like this: do you want to build capabilities to respond to an incident or do you want to prevent it from happening in the first place?
You need both, but they tend to compete for the same pot of money.
There's a nasty tangled ball of motivations, recriminations, blame, avoidance and desk pounding of NEVER AGAIN that happens with every incident. If we could fix that, this cycle might break but I'm going to assume for the time being that we will all continue to be human.
To be clear, I'm in general case discussion of emergency response philosophies/broken logic here.
There is a school of thought that regards focusing on response, with gear, training, and personnel ready to go as admitting defeat. You're letting the bad things happen!!!
I'm very proud of all of you for identifying that these are all TERRIBLE IDEAS. The thing about terrible ideas is that they still occur to people and sometimes staggering amounts of money will be spent to try to make them real and marginally less terrible.
To those who refuse to play inside the constraints of the poll and demand more reasonable and less theater destroying options, I think you haven't had the pleasure to read/experience enough of the systems development and appropriations process. We get to your answer...eventually.
Or we may invent/develop your answer several times, shelve it, and it never sees the light of day because the cash pipeline for development is not aimed at your baby. It becomes one of the deep sighs of armchair generals that think of all the designs that could've been.
[pinches bridge of nose in pain] No, thirsty bullion sellers, I am not a goldbug that needs Pearl Harbor "coins" or ingots of destroyed vessels or old racist propaganda slogans in 999 gold.
It definitely makes me want to slap someone.
I'm forming an image in my mind of who will be excited to buy this. It is a Brimley-form WWII enthusiast who exclusively wear Navy ship hats for vessels they never served on, likely sunk or decommissioned before they were born. I have met so many of them at museums and parks. :(
*Army subtype, as there are variants of this species morally opposed to the existence of water much less a Navy, of This Guy's hat has $WAR_NAME on it. VETERAN may be on it as well, but there is no guarantee that they are a veteran of that war.
When you hand me an incident report and you list "training issues" as a root cause, you just told me that I need to pay MUCH CLOSER ATTENTION to management and the person that wrote this report.
Because let us take a moment to look at the Safety Professional's Blessed Cosmology. Training sits in Administrative Controls. If there is an issue of training, I'm gonna ask what specifically the issue is and why there isn't elimination, substitution, or engineering controls.
If you tell me training is a root cause, you're going to need to prove to me you've done the analysis that you've explored the other options and, shucks, darn, training is the only way to go here.
Running toward things everyone else is running away from to help is the magical brain judo Floridians do. In my career, emergency response services around the country are disproportionately staffed by former Floridians.
Sometimes Florida Man makes the crisis. Sometimes we help.
There also was a surprising number of Floridians in Antarctica, overrepresenting their proportion of the population. I credit this to strong familiarity of working with gov't contractors in a low/zero worker rights environment. Also, "I am fucking done with hurricane season."
Just took a look at my "Coins Of Failure" aborted rant again. There's still gold (not literally) in them thar shattered dreams of states that might have been. Or, in most cases for those that became more than a feeble dream, didn't exist for long.
Mind you, if they'd actually had any gold, they might've made it.
But this is also why themes of $INSERT_FAILED_REGIME gold hang on in stories. It's not that the regime was wrong, but they never got a chance to go big because the gold was lost.
SEE ALSO: Secret Nazi Gold Train
This is an excuse to use what I’ve had saved on my phone for years.