An embarrassment

Note: I will be writing with initials today. This does not normally find itself to be the case in my entries, but due to not wanting to have things reflect poorly upon any individual or department, I have opted to do so today.

Well, the fire department was...interesting...to say the least today. I got woke up by a call for mutual aid to PPFD for a "fire". They wanted our Tanker, which is fine. We run excellent tanker ops. I heard KB on the radio telling Dispatch that he was on his way through PP and would be at CFD(I)'s station in about 10 minutes. So I got up, got dressed, and got to the station shortly after KB left in CFD(I)'s Tanker with DR. KB's daughter C was at the station, one of our explorers. She told me her dad had told her to wait, and if somebody else arrived, to go out there in CFD(I)'s Battalion with a cooler full of ice and bottled drinking water. So far so good.

Me and CB arrive on the scene right near downtown PP in CFD(I)'s Battalion, and followed CFD(I)'s Tanker to a filling location. As it turned out, DR refused to go help fill the tanker and stayed at the scene, which is completely unacceptable in the first place. CB and myself assisted, and followed CFD(I)'s Tanker to a location behind CFD(II)'s Engine where CFD(I)'s Tanker supplied it with water. DR returned from someplace, apparently the Command Post, to inform us that he had left a $1200 handheld radio on the bumper of CFD(I)'s Tanker before KB took it to fill up, so we had now lost a $1200 radio that we couldn't find.

Command came over to tell us that they had a Quint coming from TCFD to use its aerial gun to spray water from above. TCFD arrived, and PPFD broke down the entire water supply to let them set up their Quint (despite a superior location being ready and clear for the Quint) and began operations. I'm not going to even get into how much of a cluster the command situation was. Shortly thereafter, DR makes us aware that we have been cleared to leave. Me and KB found this unusual, since there was lots of work and water supply to be done. Also, we were still supplying CFD(II)'s Engine with water, while many other Engines were doing nothing. This is pretty much unheard of. DR broke down our connection and we departed.

We arrive back at station. KB is already fumingly annoyed at DR over the radio and the fact that CFD(I)'s Tanker's accountability tags and passports were still in PP somewhere, missing, since DR gave them to someone who put them somewhere we were not aware of and we couldn't retrieve them. What's even worse is that DR laughed and said that he had gone to Command and had seen WW (a former CFD(I) captain who hates CFD(I) there as one of those in charge. Long story and I don't know the half of it. He was quitting as I was joining, so I don't know the guy. DR apparently asked while CFD(I) Tanker was out filling up they were done with us. This is another unacceptable action, since it implies that you and your department have better things to do than help them. Our new and improving relationship with PPFD was not helped by this in any way, shape, or form.

To make matters worse, right afterward we picked up traffic on the radio scanner that GFD was being called for their tanker, FMFD was being called for a tanker, LFD was being called for manpower and I think maybe a tanker, and WFD for an Engine and manpower. All of these departments are much further than us. Which made myself and KB particularly annoyed with DR for humiliating our department like that. Fortunately, like usual, DR had already left. We wondered idly why he volunteers if all he wants to do is go home. We had wanted to fight fire. If we had known he had done that I would have told him to take the Battalion and go home, and then I would have gone to command and apologized for his actions right away and ridden home in the Tanker. I plan to write an email today to PPFD's chief and call PPFD's chief tomorrow about it. I want him to be aware that he acted on his own and his actions do not represent the rest of the department. Not being an officer, I can't exactly speak for us officially, but since I was there I feel somewhat responsible for his not having been stopped or questioned more closely in regards to what he was telling us.

DR returned, got a mild talking-to by our chief, and me and DR were sent in CFD(I)'s Brush truck to stand by at WFD's station. We went and had sandwiches at the meat market, and hung around the station. I looked up problems with my website and found out why, which will follow my long rant about DR dragging down the quality of CFD(I). When we heard WFD check en route back to W, DR insisted that we go back to CFD(I). I had planned on waiting for WFD to get back, but I was sick of him. So I got in, and halfway there we heard our chief on the radio to WFD's assistant chief telling him the CFD(I) crew would stay at WFD's station until he arrived to release us. So rather than return to WFD station, DR decided we should stage halfway between.

As soon as we arrived halfway between, we got paged out for a grass fire in CC. This meant driving back on the same street past WFD's station, a good 4 minutes away, where we should have been. I know they saw us, too. It made me even more annoyed with DR and how he reflected on our department. After that there is little to say, we went to the fire (which was nearly nothing) and went back to station.

As far as the website issue above, I redid my website yesterday using XHTML Strict 1.0, CSS, and a limited amount of Javascript. Everything looked good, my CSS and XHTML Strict 1.0 passed the W3C testers with flying colors, and everything seemed great. I tested it today on the fire department's computer and learned that Internet Explorer doesn't support XHTML. At all. Even 7.0 will not support it, despite the standard being more than a half-decade old. My page turns out as just a blank black page on it. While this proves my stance that Internet Explorer is an embarrassment as a web browser, it doesn't make my page work on it, and sadly a lot of misguided people have failed to switch to something better like Firefox. So now I have to figure out what to do. I don't want to crumble and use one of Microsoft's hacky broken methods of making it sort of work, but I don't want to make my page unreadable for average users. I'll have to figure something out.

I am interested to know what browsers people out there are really using. A lot of statistics claim different things, probably because different user bases respond to different things. Who out there is using Firefox? Internet Explorer? Opera? Konqueror? Safari? Something else? And on what operating system? Feel free to respond in comments, I am really curious to know.

Now Playing: The W's - J.P.
Computer: aoi-chan.systemsalchemy.org
Operating System: Linux aoi-chan 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 #2 PREEMPT Wed Mar 29 19:27:33 CST 2006 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) processor GNU/Linux
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060613 Firefox/1.5.0.4