Proverbs 26, Verse 10
"The master may get better work from an untrained apprentice
than from a skilled rebel!"
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
When I was hired as an EMT in 2005, I hadn't ever sat behind the wheel of an ambulance. Why exactly that happened is rather a long story, and it's kind of illegal, so I guess the less said about that the better. I had my share of fender-benders in just shy of two years on the street, but, fortunately, I didn't kill anybody, and I managed to leave with my reputation, such as it was, relatively intact. But Mario Andretti I was not-- not even when we ran lights and sirens. It was more like "Driving Miss Daisy."
I kissed a concrete barrier at a gas station, bumped ever so tenderly into a U-Haul van on a suburban street and, on the very day we moved into a new base, drove straight into the wall of our brand new garage, ripping wood and fiberglass off the frame door. That earned me a round of slow claps from my colleagues who were standing around the garage watching the show.
Nevertheless, although it's possible that I'm seriously kidding myself, I think people liked me in those days. Most people. Most of my coworkers, almost all of the patients, lots of the nurses (one even slipped me her phone number!) and one of my supervisors liked me enough to hang up his white shirt and sit beside me in the truck every day for over a year. Well, there were other reasons why he did that. On our last shift together, I bent down to lift the stretcher up with Mike and I said to the patient, "Going up, sir: third floor, underwear, socks, stuffed animals." Mike grinned as we popped the stretcher up together. "Well," he said, "there won't be another one like you."
Maybe they knew what they were doing, hiring me. Maybe they just didn't care. Shiftwork is shitwork, and it's all about getting warm bodies out on the street, warm bodies stuffed into crap-box ambulances, clock in, clock out, do your trip sheets, document, document, document. Chirp chirp! Throw on a fresh sheet, get a run, hit the lights. They don't care who you are, as long as your shirt is buttoned and tucked in. Actually, they only care about if they're looking for a reason to fire you. They were never looking to fire me, but they weren't exactly jumping up and down to promote me, either.
I took that job because I didn't know what the hell else to do. Being unemployed doesn't feel very nice, especially when you're in a relatively new relationship and you're still going out and meeting new people who invariably ask "and what do you do" immediately after learning and forgetting your name. Nevertheless, the idea of starting a whole new job and, basically, identity, completely from scratch was terrifying. And it made me long for the days of apprenticeships, some people knew you didn't know shit about shit, and they actually took the time to take you under the wing and teach you something.
You know, unlike school. Particularly EMT school, which taught me that everybody passes the test as long as they could pay the fee (most of them couldn't) and you don't make crass comments at the autopsy (some of them couldn't do that, either). But the actual teaching was done by a burned out medic who had kidney stones and it seemed like once a week we would find him doubled over in pain, sweating like a hog on the floor when we'd come in for class or back from lunch. One day, maybe half-a-year after I had been on the street, I heard someone call my name as I walked with my partner through a local hospital's telemetry wing. It was my old instructor, lying in a bed hooked up to several IV's being pushed behind me by a nurse.
"I always knew you'd be the only one to fuckin' graduate!" he said to me.
"Actually," I pointed out, "I was one of two who graduated."
"Yeah, but that other scumbag got arrested last month," he said with a wry smile as the nurse turned him down another hallway.
I think I would have really enjoyed being an apprentice, because I like looking up to elderly, wizened people. The craggier the face, the better. I respect downy, silvery hair and bad teeth, crinkly old potato fingers and halitosis. That says to me: kid, I've been there. And now the Junior Executive V. P. is thirty-two and he's already plotting to walk on your spine all the way to the Maserati dealership to trade in his Audi while you fumble and dither and diddle yourself behind your desk because it's all you ever learned to do because nobody bothered to teach you anything because you're supposed to ride the log flume out of the womb knowing how to write proposals and calculate averages and fix flat tires and clean your gutters and diagnose and communicate and solve for x and extrapolate the conjugation of the functional conjunction of y.
Why?
I don't know. Because something changed. The world changed. No more apprenticeships. No more mentors. There's just you and me, and, I hate to break it to you, son: but you're on the stretcher and I'm behind the wheel.
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