“Planning” is an element of almost everything we do. When you go to bed at night, you are planning in your mind what you’ll be doing the next day, or even next month. When you go to the grocery store you do some planning. That usually involves preparing a list of needed goods to purchase, and planning which store(s) you’ll be visiting to get them. Planning is just such an ingrained behavior that we seldom give it any thought.
But there are two kinds of planning: Good planning and poor planning. And the outcome of anything you do is dependent on how effectively you’ve planned your moves, whether it be grocery shopping or putting out a fire. In my FRD one of the three shifts is commanded by an upper-level captain who is in charge of the entire station’s functions, including ordering all the station supplies. Whenever somebody was newly-promoted to that position, my advice to them was simple: Never run out of toilet paper. It doesn’t matter what you do with anything else, or how it works out. Everybody turns left when they should have turned right once in a while and you can be forgiven for the occasional mistake. But …… if the station runs out of TP, then your a$$ is grass and there is no forgiveness for that.
Our fiscal year begins on July 1, so that means the month of June is slim pickings for getting anything out of the warehouse. If you don’t plan ahead and have a sufficient amount of things like cleaning supplies (and toilet paper) already on hand to get you through June, then you’ll be in the hurt locker for a couple of weeks. And part of that planning included squirreling enough of your stock away in hiding to keep from being raided.
You see, there were always a few stations that had senior captains who didn’t learn the stocking-up game and would be running short of essentials along about June 20th. And you could bet that if you got an emergency call, then as soon as the apparatus was out of sight, a foreign ambulance would be slipping into the back lot of the station and their shopping trip would begin. And Presto! all your careful planning was compromised. Unless you had planned further and hidden your vital supplies away.
So you see, it takes more than just planning to be a success. It takes good planning and extended planning. What brought this subject to mind was an article that I read yesterday about a 3-day beer festival in Scotland England that had to shut down after two days because they ran out of beer. The Scotsman reported it:
The Beer on the Wye festival in Herefordshire bucked tales of economic doom and gloom after it saw a 30 per cent increase in attendance of thirsty punters who literally drank it dry.
The three-day event, organised by the Herefordshire branch of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra), was due to run until yesterday evening but organisers had to bring it to a close after they completely ran out of beer.
A message on the website said: “Beer on the Wye has been drunk completely dry.”
Man, that’s even worse than running out of toilet paper.
Hey, we’d better get the equipment checked out. I’m planning on making a fresh pot of coffee.
