WOW--It's getting thick...

My main "day job" career thing is that I'm the newly appointed Tiered Emergency Medical Dispatch Supervisor at the Orange County Fire Authority (the 4th largest fire department in California, thank you very much). We are switching over from our current method of giving "pre-arrival" instructions to medical emergency callers to a system where we attempt to do some minor "triaging" before we dispatch units. Triage means to figure out just how bad someone is sick or injured. It's a completely different way of doing things, and many, many departments depend on this "tiered" dispatching approach because it saves money on keeping as many units from responding "Code 3" to calls which is a risky business in and of itself. I can already sense you're falling asleep reading this.

ANYWAY...this process of changing over is just tedious, and it has to be thought out, with every nuance discussed and "played out". It's completely different for me to go from being a "floor supervisor" and having a crew of 8 dispatchers that I watched over and worked with, to a desk job, attempting to create a new system of stuff that satisfies the medical needs of the department and the county, our Executive Management and Board of Directors, our operations staff, the firefighter union, common sense, the dispatcher training...the list goes on and on.

Today--after a major committee meeting we had this morning, I came out of there with my head spinning just a bit, and starting to feel a little overwhelmed. I have to produce a 10 minute video that's going to go out to the field (all 61 stations--750 full time fire fighters and a gazillion reserves), and I have to synthesize all of this "stuff". <> Yowza! Luckily, the A/V dude here at the Fire Department is a sharp, award-winning video dude (serious--he's won industry type awards for corporate video stuff), so I'll be working with him.

This is all a far cry from doing what I love--and that's drill design, teaching, judging--the whole "marching arts" thing. Oh well...it certainly pays the bills, that's for sure. Which reminds me--why this season out of the blue the sudden interest in me being a drill designer for so many groups. I gotta get a handle on things, because I'm just not going to be able to ever do what I did back in the early 90's and write for 13, 14, or 16 schools. I ain't no Dave Weinberg--who regularly every year writes for about 30 schools all over the country. Truth be told, I've always wanted to try to match him because he was an inspiration to me (at least from a business model if not creatively with his designs), but I never reached his level of success. Don't know if I have it in me to. But I do love drill design...something about creating a show.... <>

Till next time, hope you enjoyed it...now get outta here.