Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Captain Steps Up

Drew is on a temporary assignment as Battalion Chief for a couple months. His rotation started on Friday. For you uninitiated, this means he gets to wear a white shirt, drive the Fire SUV, and tell everybody how to put the water on the fire.

At the same time, his faithful sidekicks were both promoted to Captain. Of course, they will not be taking on the mantle of Captain America, but they are welcome to use any other country name in their superhero title. Captain Belgium sounds nice.

Needless to say they were in the mood to celebrate at the fire station on Friday.

Celebrations at the fire station consist of the consumption of mass quantities of meat, followed by several gallons of ice cream, followed by largely unsuccessful attempts at watching an action-packed, explosion-filled man-movie, interrupted as they inevitably are by fire calls (or more likely, lame calls for bogus fire alarms and tummy aches) or spontaneous, meat-induced napping.

I made one of my once-a-year appearances at the fire station to help celebrate. Nothing has changed. The living room is still full of giant-sized recliners lined up in front of the TV, the kitchen is a maze of refrigerators - one for each shift to cut down on (but by no means eliminate) inter-shift pilfering - and ugly dishes. Citizens, you can rest easy knowing that your tax dollars are not being wasted on china (or forks with all the tines facing the proper direction, for that matter) for the fire stations.

And lastly, I dare you to place your face on the carpet in the dining room and not come away with a methicillin-resistant strain of staph infection. It would be safer to lick the engine bay floors than to touch that carpet.

Congratulations to all the up-and-comers. See you in a year or so.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Luddite who will remain nameless: Click on Name/URL. You can leave your name, but you don't have to include a URL.

Anonymous said...

Did it, but it doesn't wor....hey...