Tuesday, September 16, 2008

A good idea or no?


In case there's a major outbreak of some sort at our prison (I guess "outbreak" isn't really the right word, here) or another in our state, each facility has an "Emergency Squad" or "E-Squad" specifically trained to respond. These few people (I think there may be 20-25 at each facility) recieve more weapons training and more physical defenses training and more chemical agents training and get to play with all the neat toys that we po' folks don't get to use. And for this they get around fifty dollars more each month. You have to be fairly physically fit just to join and you have to take a test every year to show you are still in shape. Me, I'm not the physically fit type. I got bad feet and bad ankles and I don't like running around in all that heavy gear. Not for fifty bucks a month, anyway. I leave that sort of thing to the younger more gung-ho types. We get alot of those. Enough that we don't usually have a shortage on E-squad. So, this is a good thing that we have all these fit young men to step in if things go south. I'm glad they are there, just in case. The problem with this (and there's ALWAYS a down side) is that they do their training at least once a month so there's at least one day a month when there are 20-25 people who are not at work. This is a definite downside. And it's never on say, a sunday when vitually nothing happens. It's always during the week and things tend to hop during that time. Hardly a day goes by anyway when we are completely staffed. I would hate to be the lieutenant who does the staffing rosters. You never have enough people to go around to begin with, then remove 20 of them from a day and you are screwed. So what do we do? We can't just pay these people to sit around in the firehouse and wait for the bell to ring. No, we have them doing other jobs like volunteer firemen do and when the alarm goes off (or, more correctly their pagers) then they get suited and booted and ready to rock. It's a dilemma.
P.S. -- I know I'll catch hell for this one. Questioning E-Squad? Is he crazy???
I'm not questioning their existence. Like I said, I'm glad they do what they do. But it's a dilemma.

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