Whats one of your favorite free time activites to do at the firehouse? I know some of the paid guys don't get a lot of free time, but we all enjoy the tidbits we get when we do. For volunteers, how often does everyone just stop in the firehouse and hang out for a few hours?
Balls in your court.
Hello to all, to start off, I usually stay at my vollie house 2 nights and come in 3 times a week. Due to up coming grants, I am in more. Alot of the us, guys and gals, are into firearms, so, like tomarrow, we load up and head to the range to "let out frustrations" (its official if you call it that). It keeps us in touch with each other and it puts us on a non-professional setting.
im a junior firefighter in bagdad and usually im up there as much as i can. We all have to code to get in but technically were not supposed to be in there without an adviser or full firefighter with us for insurance reasons after a halligan tool went missing, (we later found that a former junior who had the code broke in and put the tool on ebay, we got him before he sold it though) Anyway i try to always be there to help out with something if they need it. Im horrified by the post by Erin Shea, we would never leave our station a mess or we would be out. If were up there we usually just sit around and talk or work, we leave our toys (bikes, skateboards) at home, and listen to whoever is up there and in charge. Usually the work involves cleaning the trucks,cleaning hose, checking air packs, cleaning the kitchen/meeting room and reorganizing the upstairs which gets messy really quick (we keep our spare gear upstairs and you have to look through the whole pile to find whatever you need.) I honestly wanna stay with my station as long as i can so i would never do anything that might mess up my chances of staying on there.
I study for my degree and work on various training ideas. When not working on something serious, usually a prank is being concocted. Eating and lifting weights are favorite activities as well. Death matches over who gets the last breadstick are rather frequent and necessary.
I have encourged our department to have little family get togethers. Some houses don't welcome families & think that it is only a place for us to work when we need to. Officers don't encourage fellowship or bringing your children with you. Sometimes giving the wives time to chat with each other and the kids time to play together helps them not feel left out while you spend so much time @ the fire station. Some of the wives will get on the phone to comfort & console each other while we are out on calls. They sometimes enjoy working together @ fund raisers & in planning & doing functions like the Christmas Dinner.
After calls when we've gone back to the station & cleaned everything up & back in service is when we end up sitting down, ordering up some food & talking about anything & everything. I call it a cool down period. Everyone is tired, in a good mood when everything went well, we need to rest but we know if we went home we wouldn't sleep.
jenny, I believe that adding the element of family helps to make the stresses of "choosing" (yes I have heard the term) the fire department over family activites easier. Having the family take part in functions allows friendships and bonds be made, and made stronger.
Permalink Reply by Jeff on December 30, 2008 at 1:20am
Me and a couple of the guys try to go down to the station atleast a couple times a week and just do little things like sweeping out bays and keeping the trucks clean, checking PPE, etc. Just little things to make sure everything works right when it needs to. Weather permitting its always nice to open up all the bay doors just to show people that were there...It's always fun to show the little kids in town around the trucks to...
At this combined house were i work as vollie, we are not allowed to hang around.
Only for training evenings, calls and gear maintenance is reasons that we can stay at firehouse.
We´re irritating paid crews by just being in fire house.
Old thing from early -90´s when relationship between volunteers and paid crews started to go bad..
When year changes, in few days. I´m taking my bunker gear to next fully vollie fire house from where i live.
there´s policy is: Hang around as much as you like, but don´t sleep at firestation.