The smartest person in the world is the one who knows the limits of his own knowledge

We were called to what was the best fire of my short career the other night. It was a great experience, and, when I sit back and think about it for a while, it's amazing how much I learned from that one incident. One could spend 16 weeks or 160 weeks in the academy, but there's no teacher like the real thing. That's not a knock on training--I think we should train more than we do...a lot more. I just don't think it's possible to create the same environment in a training situation that exists at a real incident. But, that's a tangent I don't want to explore right now.

The real point of this drivel was my realization of how much I don't know. It's a huge wake-up call. I now know that I've been skating by. It's pretty easy to sit around and get lulled into thinking you know everything when you work at a station like mine--one of the highest call volumes in the department but a low occurrence of fire, especially first-in fire. Then, I get one of those fires, and I end up feeling like I'm bumbling around while all the people who know what they are doing act quickly and with purpose. They intuit things that I'd actually have to see happening. I can bury my head in the books, and I will, but there's a lot of knowledge that doesn't lie within those books. I sure hope that knowledge comes with experience. If it's instead an innate knowledge, I might as well find another vocation.

So, I'll reopen the books, but, I'll also hope for more fire (sorry, property owners) and take every bit of knowledge I can from both. On a side note, it was pretty fulfilling to finally have a "good" fire. It makes you feel a little less like a social worker in a KCFD uniform and more like a firefighter.