I once copresented a “Behavioral Fatalities” workshop for the Fire Department Instructors Conference. Down the hall, another workshop, “Reading Smoke,” was in progress. Guess which program generated more interest?
Oddly enough, when people started coming back from our first break, the class filled up. When we asked where everybody had come from, they said their buddies came and got them when they found out we were talking about questionable ride-alongs; guys running their pool, landscaping, or construction businesses out of the station; racing rescues; boyfriend/girlfriend confrontations; and jealous spouses with loaded handguns.
My copresenter picked the program’s title. I wanted to call it “Slamming Your Head in a Car Door” or “What To Do with Your Free Time at the Fire Station.” Other title ideas included “How to Tell Your Senior Firefighter that His Girlfriend Needs To Go Home Because His Wife and Kids Just Came in with Cookies for Their Daddy”; “How To Get Through Battalion Training with a Hangover”; “Is It Just Good Old Hazing or Assault?”; and “How To Keep Crew Accountability Intact When the Sheriff Serves an Arrest Warrant on One of the Crew.” But no, it was the watered-down, intellectual “Behavioral Fatalities.”
Neither risk management nor customer service has to be dull. Risk management is dangerous and exciting. It’s lurid and impossible to look away from, like a car wreck. It’s how gossip was born-pure, unadulterated, “delicious” bad stuff happening to someone else. Gossip focuses on what we do and say (our behavior), not on buildings or fire. We may talk about big calls, but we don’t whisper about them. We don’t call other fire stations with incomparable glee and start conversations with, “Have you heard what so-and-so just got in trouble for?” and end with “He made his first ladder company roof sector.”
The problem with risk management is that the people who deal with it, talk about it, and write about it are in a position of authority and have a responsibility to be managers. So they clean it all up, scouring all the dirty parts so it doesn’t look so bad. They take all the fun out of it. By the time they are finished, it bears no resemblance to anything anybody did at home or at the station. It is so unrecognizable and buried in confidentiality that it doesn’t even serve as a cautionary tale.
Customer service suffers from the same blight. Let’s be honest. Customer service is a drag. It’s going Code 2 instead of Code 3. It’s for sissies who could never make it to the big leagues. You can’t attach the word “hero” to a customer service call. No adoring citizen will ever ask in bated breath, “Weren’t you scared?’ when you returned unharmed from giving an intoxicated residentially challenged individual a blanket.
We don’t do tabletop discussions on your first and second Band-Aid® placement. You will never need to spend four hours in the gym to have the cardiovascular capability to drag your freshly awakened body down a hallway to investigate a beeping sound at 3 a.m. only to find that the overprivileged taxpayer did not want to spend five dollars on a nine-volt battery when we can provide one for free. Besides, the vaulted ceilings are hard to reach, and keeping a ladder in the garage could scratch the Jag. After all, isn’t that what we are being paid for? There is no fire department award for “Battery Changer of the Year.”
CUSTOMER SERVICE NEEDS A MAKEOVER
Is customer service such an awful part of our job that the only reason that justifies being in that hallway at 3 a.m. is that smoke has banked down to the floor? Crawling on your hands and knees down a smoky hallway at 3 a.m. is about as exciting as it gets. Maybe throw in Dispatch telling you it has reports of people trapped, just before you hear your air brake set and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as you go in.
Okay, if little Billy’s asthma has his oxygen saturation at 43, that could be a legit reason to be in that hallway, but very little else is.
That same customer for whom we exhausted every ounce of our self-discipline and control not to throw him down the stairs is our reason for being if that person is almost dead. Most of our customers are a lot easier to deal with when they are unconscious.
Car fires are so much more satisfying, even with all of the new air bags. Toss some magnesium in, and it’s just like a party. Where’s the party in customer service? “Fighting the beast” was not a slogan created for the battery demanders, but it is frighteningly accurate at times.
We need to make customer service more appealing and put the street into it, make it dangerous and exciting. It does not matter that every rational human being in the modern fire service understands that the only reason we are employed is because of our ability to deliver quality-added, value-driven customer service. It doesn’t matter. We don’t care. We are emotional, not rational, about our jobs.
Just because we may not always be rational does not mean that we aren’t adults. You have to be over 18 to get these jobs. Let’s put an “R” rating on it. Why do we treat customer service with clean white gloves? There is nothing clean or politically correct about a heroin addict who on being roused with Narcan® throws up all over your brush pants, all the while screaming at you for ruining his high. This is work. There is nothing white-glove about it. We have to wear special disposable gloves on every single call to keep from getting whatever it is they may or may not have on us. Why don’t we talk about it?
Just as in risk management, customer service is dirty and grimy where the work or the trouble happens. Discretionary time, customers, goofy coworkers, goofy captains, and the like are tough. Managers, chief officers, and the people responsible when it goes wrong can dress it up all they want.
But for the people who are on the trucks, showing up and doing the work, customer service is always going to be the wallflower at the party. How many firefighters do you know who would walk across the room to make time with a wallflower? What about putting some of that vocabulary into our talks about the work we do? Customer service is in desperate need of a makeover. I mean she may never end up being a trophy, but she could be the one to take home to meet your folks.
Real calls. Real customers. Real problems. Real outcomes. It’s the biggest part of what we do. It’s about time we got some stature for giving the incontinent intoxicated person a ride home (on a hot day, it’s almost impossible to get that smell out of the truck) when we didn’t have to. It’s easy to be nice to little kids and people with clean houses, but cool heads and cool tempers are essential when dealing with difficult people and situations.
Do you have to be the first one in? Got to have the nozzle? Is your rep everything to you? Well, odds are good you’re the first one to complain on-scene. You’re the first one to snivel about going on a call that doesn’t live up to your red twitch fibers. And for some inexplicable reason, should a fight break out on a call, it’s because of something you did or said. Worse, if this describes you, odds are that you’re also taking that hoseline to the wrong place and causing more damage with the tools than necessary.
Your job is not about the work you do. It’s about you proving yourself. If that’s what you’re looking for, you will never find it. It’s got you; you don’t have it. You don’t have the guts to be inconvenienced. You don’t have the patience to sit by and not rush an octogenarian who has to be persuaded that if he goes into the hospital, he will see his home again. Are you tough enough not to abuse people with less seniority or rank than you? On your best day, do you think in your heart of hearts that you have the guts to make eye contact with a grieving spouse or that you could stay in the same room with that person for as long as you are needed?
Following is an anonymous letter from a firefighter about customer service.
I have been shot at on this job, and to this day, one of the hardest things I have ever done was on a call for an attempted suicide. A teenage boy’s mother came home to find her son had shot himself in the chest. I was the captain on the call. I canceled ALS, called a 901-H, and special-called the police.
Sometimes, just for the survivor’s sake, we work the victim. With this woman, I thought it would seem more final to her to have it be irrefutable. While we waited on-scene for the police, my crew was hiding outside.
The mother took me to every photograph of her son at every stage of his life, and she had pictures of him everywhere, hanging on walls and set on mantels. And at every single picture, she wanted me to confirm that he looked happy, he had always been so happy, and that I could see that too. She wasn’t just making it up; it all couldn’t have been a lie.
She begged me to tell her what she could have done to stop him. I told her that people who had really made up their minds to commit suicide didn’t talk about it; they did it.
It took the police officer one hour and 24 minutes to get on-scene. The longest call of my life.
Several months later, she sent a letter to the fire department, commending us. She said if we had not been patient with her when she was in such a fragile state that she did not think that she would have ever recovered. My not blaming her was the only thing that kept her from blaming herself.
My personal definition of bravery was forever changed. I don’t think I have ever done anything more important on a call.
Are you tough enough? This kind of service isn’t for the meek.
M.C. HYYPPA is a captain with a large metropolitan fire department.
