Let's share the worst things we've had to endure as employees. I'll go first:

Teenage, food service, pizza. The AC breaks in the middle of a California summer, easily 110°f outside, 115°f inside the store (verified), with 500°f open-ended ovens running nonstop. Then the makeline which holds ingredients breaks. The cheese melts into clumps. We stay open, business as usual. Also, no breaks, ever. Pay: $8.50/hr.

Adult, teaching, high school. No in-class heat for four years. School provides one basic 11" fan heater used to warm small bedrooms. My class ceilings are at least 12ft with tons of windows. I developed a routine of showing up an hour early, turning on the collection of heaters I'd acquired (including several from home), and get the room up to a sweltering 62°f by first period. I also figured out which electrical items can be plugged into which outlets and how to reset the fuse panel on a moments notice. I have photos of my students huddled around an oil-radiator with their hands out, eager for even a semblance of heat.

Your turn:

  • Zoift [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I've got one I've been meaning to write into safety 3rd about.

    So around 5 years ago I was working as an EMT at a non-emergency transport company. We mostly dealt with dialysis calls and discharges, but we also had an air wing of the company, and so would occasionally pick up patients from flight crews out of cessnas & shit at small regional airports. Except for the one time we picked up out of one of the largest & busiest commercial airports in the US.

    The call was to pick up a patient from out of a 747 for transfer to an extremely ritzy rehab facility. The patient is question was a rich PMC dumbass who obliterated himself trying to ski down a mountain in Europe, and had so thoroughly broken his legs he required some sort of experimental treatment that involved a hemipelvectomy. (Which I didn't even know was a thing until this call.)

    The trouble started almost immediately, because almost all major airports have dedicated Fire & Medic units, so there's not any good signage for where to park an ambulance, and people get mad and yell at you if you just park in the middle & block off the terminal, and nobody could tell us where we should park.

    Eventually I just commandeered the sidewalk and told people to politely shut up, Which worked until we had to go through TSA screening with our stretcher. Almost didn't make it through at first because nobody told them we were coming and they didn't know how to x-ray a stretcher. I didn't mention to oxygen bottle, lithium batteries, or the bag full of narcotics, because I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have let us through.

    Anyways, when we board the plane it's immediately obvious there's no way in hell we were going to be able to fit the stretcher through an airplane isle, and we left our backboards back at the truck, but it turns out it's cool. The patient has his lower torso & legs wrapped in a meter-wide erector-set cage of steel bars & pins that perforate his leg like some hell-raiser shit, and the guy isn't going to fit through the front of the plane anyways.

    Turns out they loaded the guy into the back of the plane in Europe, and didn't think it was relevant to tell anyone on our end. Which was great, because the boarding ramps are designed differently in burgerland or something and was completely unable to reach the rear door.

    I called my supervisor to complain and tell him this whole thing is a complete mess, and they can show my unit cancelled on-scene. We can't take over care of the patient and they need to figure this shit out and call us back. This did not help, as the quisling made us stand-by and ended up coordinating with the airport FD and runway personnel.

    An incredibly stupid plan was born to ride a scissor-lift 7 meters up to the rear door of the plane with the stretcher, and transfer the patient through the door onto it. The scissor-lift in question was made for maintenance, and we could almost have room for myself, my partner, a single firefighter & the stretcher if we leaned over it & let our heels dangle. It should be noted the brakes on a stretcher are largely decorative.

    I should have refused, but this had taken so long it was almost the end of my shift, and I just wanted to get this shit over with, go home, and get really goddamn drunk. So we rode the damn thing up & tried our best to keep the patients pelvis stable as a dozen people bent & manhandled several thousands of dollars of medical braces while we twisted him out of the doorframe. The patient wasn't very happy about it, and threatened to sue all of us, but I've never gotten a summons for that so he can blow me.

    He didn't really fit on our stretcher either, due to the thunderdome of medicine around his legs, so once we got him onto it there wasn't any room to ride the thing down with 3 people again. My partner and the random firefighter managed to scuttle back into the rear door, and I rode the thing down holding onto the patient cage, railing, and stretcher with flexibility I didn't think I had.

    Once he was on the ground we pumped him full of fent and stuffed airplane pillows & backboard straps around him until he vaguely resembled being secured, and transported without incident.

    Fuck airports.