FIGHTING FIRES WITH WORDS
BY BILL MANNING
About a year ago, I was amazed to overhear a group of firefighters discussing the wildland “interzone.” I half-expected Rod Serling to jump out from a signpost up ahead. “You are entering The InterZone.”
And I thought “interface” was pushing it. But it`s important to keep up with advanced buzzwords. No one knows what you`re talking about, but that`s the point: Hopefully, if you keep talking BuzzWord 101 long enough, people will start to notice that you`re very, very intelligent. Knowing the right words can help, say, a big-city firefighter from the Northeast to prop himself up as an expert on wildland firefighting. Or a chief from a bedroom community who`s had seven house fires in three years can hop right onto the lecture circuit as an expert in the “Integrated Emergency Management System,” words strung together that have the same effect on me as “the artist formerly known as Prince.”
In some places, using “fire department” to refer to the fire department is a faux pas. Much too trite and pedestrian. No, our lime-yellow apparatus are proudly emblazoned with “Anytown Fire-Rescue” (which means “We Do EMS, mostly”), whose companies provide a wide variety of services, including aggressive attacks with fans; fire exposure protection; Barney costume days; loneliness calls; exciting cat rescues; damage-free overhaul; and, if they`re lucky, laundry service. Do the laundry, you say? Hey, this is 1996, and that`s what`s known as “customer service.”
The word “customer” is a very important part of the modern fire service vocabulary, and it is essential that fire-rescues use this word in public as many times as possible, every day. That way, the public and public officials know you are patronizing them and they will be more apt not only to approve an increase in your travel budget but to forgive you for burning their houses down as well. We want to provide quality service, of course. And it sounds so much better when you report to the city manager, “We fulfilled our organizational mission and customer-first service approach by mitigating a particularly stubborn thermal imbalance in the living quarters of one of our valued customers, with a minimum breakage factor” instead of “Me and the boys, we kicked butt on a cookin` blaze–we whacked that sucker!” as you wipe your nose with the back of your hand. As you can see, the “customer service” buzzword is very good for advancing the fire service toward its next evolutionary phase, which is to provide every municipal service except police work and some help around the house, too, if need be. It is especially advisable and effective to use the word “customer” at least three times in every sentence, even when issuing fireground orders, when the customer whose house you`re burning down happens to be within earshot of your command post (unless you`re one of the progressive departments with a techno-bus, then there`s no problem; see below); this will go a long way toward placating the now-frantic and panicked customer whose life has just gone up in smoke. (And since we`re on the customer service subject, it would be more appropriate for municipal fire-rescues to practice the brand-new management principle called “stockholder service,” for the people in your town don`t pay you directly for the goods and services you render; they are people with a financial and controlling interest in the operation of your company. The “stockholder service” philosophy could be integrated wit
This closely relates to the mysterious “paradigm shift” our wordmeisters sprung on us about a year or two ago, words borrowed from… wasn`t it from an early Hitchcock film noir masterpiece? At any rate, when we finally realized it didn`t refer to a new technique of managing fire station work hours or a new way to play the other team`s best hitter at the fire-rescue softball game, we looked in the dictionary and were surprised it only meant something like, “Don`t call us the fire department anymore, please! It`s the Fire/Haz Mat/Confined Space/High-Angle/Collapse Rescue/Prevention/ Laundry/Garbage/But Mostly EMS Department, to you!” And, of course, we were thrilled when someone actually swabbed the throats of 30,000 fire chiefs and soon observed a “culture change” in the fire service petri dish.
Whoever says the fire service is “200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress” has not ears to hear or eyes to see. Firefighters aren`t instructed, “Get those people down but don`t do anything stupid”; they`re required to use a facsimile of the hazard mitigation technique developed by Dr. Ignatz Pomeranz, formerly of the Soviet Union and now a Grade 5 OSHA bureaucrat, which suggests using incoming sensory data to construct a mathematical progression model to rate risk vs. benefit on a scale of 10-1 to 108, base 12.
We`re long past the street chief who rolls up his sleeves and practices asphalt management, too vulgar and inhumane a method of fireground leadership. Progress has taken the IC into the climate-controlled techno-bus for practically anything larger than a garbage can fire, from which position the IC can command in comfort and cleanliness, using words that add glamor and arcanum to a practice more than 100 years old.
We of course need bigger and better words in the fire service to make us feel like we`re jumping higher and running faster, the way we used to feel as kids when we slipped on our P.F. Flyers, so while we may not be better at what we do, we can rest easy because we have convinced ourselves and the world that a “rodent anti-escape apparatus” is better than a mousetrap.
It`s funny, though, that the words the fire service seems to have most difficult time understanding and remembering are the firefighting words. I could rattle off a list of them for you, but I have to get ready for the next stage in the evolution, which gives me no time to think about fire.
