If you haven't checked out
FireEMSBlogs.com yet, here's an invite over to see what the WebChief and others hath wrought. We've got a few of the old gang from over here on FFN blogging as well as some others, but there's some real quality information, e…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on November 19, 2009 at 9:42pm —
6 Comments
I posted a blog on Firehouse Zen yesterday relating to
evolving and changing with emerging issues and reflected on how even if we try to ignore it, the world around us is moving forward. Failing to move on from the past is only going to keep us from surviving.
This morning I was listening to
Alan Dershowitz discussing President Obama's new supreme court nominee,…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on May 26, 2009 at 10:57am —
2 Comments
Early this morning I
posted an article on my blog at Firehouse Zen regarding the need to guard against complacency and to not just expect those "smells and bells" calls to always be smells and bells, but to do…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on April 10, 2009 at 10:42am —
4 Comments
In my blog at
Firehouse Zen today: I mentioned a great homily by Father Chris where he spoke about getting the message out (you know, THE Message). I specifically discussed one of his points about how, when…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on April 4, 2009 at 4:09pm —
10 Comments
From
Firehouse Zen: I am never surprised by the willingness of firefighters to fight for what is right. I have officers that work with me as well as friends throughout emergency services who seem like they are…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on March 14, 2009 at 7:38am —
6 Comments
From
Firehouse Zen:
The other day I think we all were thinking about the death of the
child struck by a Kansas City engine as reported by Firehouse.com. As you have probably heard thousands of times before, it doesn’t take too many incidents like this one to remind you that we have a huge responsibility while driving our apparatus, and even when all things are g…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on March 7, 2009 at 6:30pm —
7 Comments
From my latest article at
Firehouse Zen:
Every time I hear someone use the term “fireproof”, it makes me think of something my dad (a retired Fire Marshal) used to say: “Nothing is fireproof; a cinderblock at the bottom of the ocean will burn i…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on February 14, 2009 at 3:30pm —
2 Comments
Like I was discussing in my blog at
Firehouse Zen, experience is useless without learning from it. As an officer with a few incidents under my belt, I too have my parking lot somewhere as a stark reminder of my failures and inadequacies (this…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on January 18, 2009 at 10:00pm —
7 Comments
From my blog at
Firehouse Zen:
What have we learned in 2008? Are we better off here on the threshold of 2009 having experienced so much in the last year? Or are we destined to repeat our mistakes? Are we advocating better cardiac fitne…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on December 30, 2008 at 4:23pm —
12 Comments
I’ve said it from the beginning- this blogging project is a work in progress for me, but I'm enjoying it and it's apparently pretty contagious. As far as my writing skills, however, I’m quickly learning about how to catch your interest in sound bites rather than in paragra…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on December 5, 2008 at 12:30pm —
6 Comments
Note: For some reason, I posted this a few minutes ago and the post disappeared into the blogosphere. If for some reason it pops up in duplicate, someone please point it out (if I haven't seen it) and I'll delete it. Nothing like identical blog entries to ruin your credibility. That should be a warning to some of you out there.
Inspired by the personal blogs of some of you (and seeing that even Webchief has his own personal blog), I have created my own blog,…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on November 26, 2008 at 11:36am —
9 Comments
Well, it was bound to happen at some point. Just when I least expected it, I've kinda hit the wall. It's actually not that I have nothing to write about or nothing I care to discuss, but each time I have leapt forward with an idea in the past week, it has turned into a ten-paragraph monster that I don't care to hit the "save" button for or more likely, one you all probably wouldn't care to read either.
I mean I could just get all over the economy and how it is impacting the fire service, but th…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on November 17, 2008 at 10:26pm —
11 Comments
With all of the change going on in the atmosphere, I was contemplating the difference between being a
rebel and a
revolutionary. It seems to me that there are plenty of firefighters who are a little mixed up and don't understand the difference. The problem is that while revolutionaries effect change in a situation, rebels simply refuse to obey.
Why should that matter? When we are agitating…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on November 5, 2008 at 11:11pm —
3 Comments
Well, I'm glad that there's been a lot of discussion about the terminology issue, but my point wasn't just about terminology and communications standardization being a problem for the fire service. Without digressing, despite some of the very considerate and well expressed views pointed out by readers in the
Terminology blog I wrote, it is a problem- go back and look at the reports of any disaster th…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on October 7, 2008 at 5:30pm —
15 Comments
Surprisingly enough, I'm sitting here at my computer wrangling over the definition of a "working fire" although after 28 years on the job, I know exactly what I mean when I say I have arrived and have a working fire, but putting it into words for our procedure manual doesn't seem to be going well.
This whole revelation occurs at the confluence of two events: 1) I'm working on our SOG manual's definitions section and 2) the other night I arrived on scene of a well-involved structure that I decla…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on September 28, 2008 at 1:00pm —
24 Comments
Customer relations are essential for any department operating in this day and age, as our customers (read: taxpayers) are more educated and have higher expectations of the emergency services. These expectations come from watching television shows that portray us in a certain light as well as more information going out in the form of public education efforts.
There are considerable efforts being made by leaders in our industry to increase our professionalism. We need to consciously market our co…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on September 21, 2008 at 11:10pm —
2 Comments
When I went to look at my blogs and realized it has been nearly a month since I posted something, I was a little shocked. The last few weeks since I returned from the NFA have been a blur; trying to get caught back up at home and at work evolved into a lot of planning and gathering information and talking with other US&R professionals around the nation as we had to deal first with Gustav and then with Hanna. And it's not over yet with Ike and Tina- no, sorry, Josephine - on deck.
I'm not ki…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on September 6, 2008 at 9:01am —
4 Comments
So anyway, I'm still here and continuing to learn some pretty amazing things about myself, since that's the jist of the fourth class in this program, Executive Leadership. One of the discussions, however, evolved around some of what I discussed in the first installment of this trip, that the NFA is underattended by the fire service. This is the same American Fire Service that complains when funding is being cut, and the same American Fire Service that complains that they don't get the respect th…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on August 7, 2008 at 5:13pm —
4 Comments
Just a very short post to promote an under-used and vitally important asset that is available to all of you- the
National Fire Academy. I'm here for year four of my Executive Fire Officer journey and getting to network with people from all over the world- there's even a mate from Australia in my class. I get to learn from world-class instructors and I get to sleep in a government-regulation bed (maybe that's not so great) and I get to hang at at the legenda…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on August 6, 2008 at 8:01am —
3 Comments
My family (or as you could guess, my wife) seems to give me the best gifts. While not much can top a little SCUBA diving with the whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium (my birthday present this year, but I actually did the dive this past weekend), for Father’s Day this year my family (read: wife) gave me the super-cool T-Mobile Wing that I have been able to track my life with while on the road, which is a lot of the time. Just ask my boss what “a lot of time” is defined as.
The problem with the…
Continue
Added by Mick Mayers on July 20, 2008 at 7:00am —
6 Comments
