This is day-1 of the summer’s major holiday weekend with excessive snacking and outdoors cooking taking up a major block of time segments. I hope you’ve mixed up your batch of Firegeezer Stadium Mustard for the weekend wieners. Speaking of snacks, do you ever watch the continuing tv series on Food Network called Unwrapped? It’s that mental chewing gum show that takes you around to hundreds of food processing places and shows you how they make things like Twinkies and candy bars and spaghetti sauce.
The other night I saw a segment where they visited one of the Doritos plants, a Frito-Lay snack that I’m sure you’re familiar with. One fact about Doritos that impressed me the most was that they manufacture 8 million bags of Doritos every day. I imagine a lot of them are those little serving-size baglets that you drop in the lunchbox or stock in vending machines. But still …. Can you imagine just how much corn that one firm alone buys each year? It’s hard to comprehend.
Back to the topic of “Survival tactics” during the current economic downturn, if you’re young and still looking for that career somewhere, don’t let all those headline stories about fire departments laying off firefighters steer you away from seeking a fire/rescue/ems position. Remember that no matter what kind of work you’re looking for, to get a job, you have to go to where the jobs are. If unemployment is high in your town because there is no work, then get off your duff and go to a place where there is still economic activity and job openings.
That’s true for firefighter jobs, too. Despite the doom-and-gloom news stories, there are still plenty of municipalities that are maintaining their public service agencies and filling vacancies, especially in the ambulance sector. If you really want your choice of where to work, get your paramedic certification and don’t be afraid to start out at a lower pay rate when you go job seeking. The private ambulance companies are especially short-handed all the time (partly due to the lower pay scales I just mentioned), and there are constant “help wanted” postings by them. The work and dedication needed to get your paramedic license automatically eliminates a lot of people who are looking for work. So if you get one of those certs., you can go anyplace you want and find an opening.
Firefighter jobs are a little different because of the necessarily lengthy hiring process, often lasting as long as a year to complete all the testing phases and waiting for recruit classes to be formed. But if you want the job badly enough, then you’ll get out there and start “dropping paper” in as many personnel departments as you can and hope one goes through for you. Believe it or not, most FD’s are not laying off personnel and closing firehouses. The ones that are doing that are largely in communities that have been ill-served by their elected officials and have not followed good budgetary practices for many years.
But look around and you’ll find plenty of places, especially in states with a constant population growth, that will be hiring over the next couple of years. And if you’ve already gotten your paramedic cert. too, then a lot of places will move you up to the top of the list as more and more FD’s expand their EMS services by putting paramedics on the trucks and engines. As an example, my own FRD that I’m retired from has never laid off a uniformed firefighter. And even with these current tough times, they’re hiring 150+ firefighters every year to fill openings created by retirements. But for any place that’s hiring, you have to compete to be chosen. So get yourself ready, whether it’s by completing paramedic school or getting yourself physically fit to pass some stringent physical requirements. Just don’t give up.
By the way, this morning’s Lineup is Firegeezer posting #6,000. That is six thousand messages covering a variety of topics that we’ve sent along to you during the past 27 months that we’ve been at it. Thank you ever so much for coming back again and again to see what we’re up to. One thing that we’re up to now is an upgrading of our website. Over the next few weeks you will be seeing some improvements and additional features showing up on our pages. So don’t go away, ok? Thanks.
Now let’s get this equipment checked out. I’ll go get the coffee started. (How many millions of cans of coffee are sold each day? How many coffee trees does it take?)
