"Nobody tells you that the job is maybe 5% fire and 95% this..."
commentFacebookPinterestLinkby Dannica RamirezBuzzFeedBuzzFeed StaffI'm a Southern California-based writer on the Lifestyle team who likes to try and rank viral foods and read and recommend awesome books.
1. "The number of homeowners who have no idea where their electrical panel is, or how to shut off the water to their own house."
4. "How many people voluntarily live in absolute filth and squalor. Cleaning up after yourself doesn't cost money."
5. "The number of people who ask, 'Do we have to pay for this?' after an incident. No, sir, we don't do that here."
7. "How many of the guys have horrible physical health."
8. "The abuse of 911. People call for everything but an emergency. It's absolutely shocking, and it's a massive amount of wasted resources."
9. "The number of fires. It's nowhere near as much as I thought."
"Bingo. Just the call volume in general for my hall. Really stands out why this isn't a career station once you're seeing it from the inside. We had 350 'events' last year, including calls, training, volunteer requests (at events, schools, etc.), and whatever else we get involved in. While yeah, that'll average out to almost one a day, it's not that at all. We rarely get a weekend call, but if we do, we get six. We get fewer than 20 'fires' per year, and that'll be anything — from a home to a trash can in a park and everything in between."
14. "The complete lack of common sense that 75%+ more that the general public has."
15. "Honestly? How abused our EMS is by dumb stuff, and how the people who truly need us rarely call."
16. "How much hatred I would get for automatic alarms. I know they are really important and save a lot of lives, but damn."
"It broke me, mentally and physically (I got injured on the job and had three back surgeries). I should have become an artist or deep-sea welder. You lose your innocence and naivete in horrible ways, and you can never go back."
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
