Sickness for Sales
Common sense comes in all forms. So does the lack thereof.
We were called today around 7:30 AM and told to report downtown at 9:00 AM for training. Naturally we donned out dress shirts and made our way to Station 1. The topic was extrication, and the information presented in the class portion was both informative and useful. The problem arose when we packed up and headed to Station 3 for the practical portion.
Let me give a background on the instructors. They are very knowledgeable people. However, they all work for a company called WSF which sells firefighting equipment and repairs our trucks when something happens. They brought Phoenix hydraulic equipment for us to use during the class. Therein lies the problem; If we’re training, we should be using our gear. We should learn the techniques using the equipment we are knowledgeable with and have on hand when we arrive at a scene. Why were we using Phoenix gear instead of the Amkus equipment we have?
It all boils down to sales, and the fact that this class was nothing more than a glorified sales pitch. In a way this was very informative. We learned that the Phoenix gear they brought is definitely inferior to our Amkus gear in power.
I would have been delighted to train with our gear, to learn techniques that we may not have known before, but the fact that we were training in 48F temperatures with hard pouring rain simply because of a sales pitch seems way beyond the point of common sense.
