I may have mentioned before that I was at one point an EMT. Aside from doing emergency calls with the local rescue squad, I worked for an ambulance transport company. This is really just as thrilling as it sounds. Ten hour shifts of transporting people from the hospital back to nursing homes or rehab centers.
There were about 12 of us working out of the local office. We would rotate partners throughout the week. Some people were good to work with, some not so good. One day I came into the office, called the dispatcher, and found out I was working with one of the girls. That was ok with me. She was perfectly nice, aside from being one of those people who thinks that other people are constantly looking at them. I don’t know if she even knew that she suffered from this affliction. It was always like, “Did you see the way that doctor was looking at me?” or “Those nurses were really staring today.” It became kind of an inside joke. Whenever she worked with another one of my buddies, I would call them on the radio and say stuff like, “Hey Joe, I’m having the weirdest day, everywhere I go it feels like people are watching me.” All of this flew right over her head.
We worked our full ten hour shift and returned to the office. She was driving when we pulled into the lot. Now, to have this make sense, I’ll have to describe our parking lot. It ran along on entire side of the the office building and continued past it into a wooded area to the rear. The parking spaces faced each other across the middle lane that you would drive in and out of. All of our employees parked on one side and the ambulances parked on the other. My partner on this day was a pretty good driver, but when she pulled into the lot and tried to back into one of the ambulance spots, she wound up crooked as all get out. I was reading a book, but I noticed and kind of laughed a little bit. She put the truck back into drive to pull forward so we could straighten out. Then we plowed right into the car in the parking spot in front of us. It was kind of amazing. My partner started freaking out, jumping up and down on the brake. We weren’t moving very fast, but the little Ford or Mercury, or whatever it was in front of us looked like we hit it going 30 miles an hour. We crunched the back of it and pushed it up and over a curb stop and into a tree that crunched the front end. I guess that 10,000 pounds does a good amount of damage no matter how fast it’s moving. Because I wasn’t the one driving, I found the whole experience really amusing. The cops came, the company accident investigator came, and they all thought we were lying about how fast the truck was going. It didn’t matter, they still had to fix the employees car. You know why? The brake line on their ambulance had broken. These are the moments when you know God is watching. We drove those ambulances fairly hard. There were plenty of opportunities for the line to blow during that day. It finally blew at a time when no one could get hurt. These are also the days when I know that my guardian angels sense of humor is similar to mine.
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