[mindcrime]

I was a volunteer firefighter from about 1992-2002 or so. During that time I attained my NC Fire and Rescue Commission certification as Fire Instructor II with qualifications to teach Firefighter I&II certification classes, LP Gas Firefighting and Incident Command. I held ranks from probie to Assistant Chief and was acting Fire Chief for a few months at one point.

So, how did I grow from all that? Well, I got a lot more comfortable operating in front of crowds, teaching and delivering content, as a result of teaching FF classes.

I also became generally more stoic and mentally "tough" if you want to call it that, since on the fireground you don't really have the luxury of freaking out and being super reactive to things. You learn to become very pragmatic and adopt a mindset of "this is the situation as it is, now let's figure out what to do about it".

And on a related note, it taught me the importance of what firefighters call "size up" which basically just means doing a quick, but reasonably thorough, assessment of a situation at the earliest possible moment, in order to avoid surprises. Example: on a house fire, if a crew go in on an attack line to do interior attack, and nobody does a 360° sizeup, you may miss the 500 gallon propane tank next to the back wall, which is being impinged on by fire. Result: BLEVE and possibly injured or killed firefighters.

And while in the business world you're not usually dealing with anything where people's lives are on the line, sizeup and those kinds of things are still important.

Anyway, I did that for about a decade, but then I moved and got into the meat of my "proper" career and don't really have time for firefighting anymore. I haven't been doing a lot of volunteering lately, but the one thing I'd like to find time to get involved with is the Literacy Council. My mom was a volunteer tutor when I was a kid and I kinda always wanted to do that.

[cableshaft]

I was touring High Voltage Software once that had a team working on a firefighting educational simulator (looks like it was called FLAME-SIM) that I got to watch for a few minutes.

The 360 degree sizeup was one of the first things they had you do when you arrived on the site of the fire in the simulation, IIRC. Apparently they thought it was important enough to include as well.