Spreading like wildfire: And baby let it burn.

  Almost daily there is a story in the news that is so salacious it becomes viral immediately whether it is true or not. This writing is inspired by a conversation I had with my brother last month. We were discussing the notion that although my recounting of many of the stories I write about are true, they are my truth. The truth from my eyes with the knowledge I had about the given situation at that one moment in time. I hadn't given it a lot of thought that some of my experiences that I remember so vividly could be viewed vastly different by another person who is coming from a completely different place. This got me thinking about perhaps interviewing a few of the participants in some of my future stories and adding their take on the story. It might be entertaining to see how multiple people all tell the same story in a different way. Minimally, It had me thinking about how quickly we can rush to judgment about someone with no more information than the color of their skin, their weight, gender, sexuality, if they have tattoos maybe, and so on. We are a very judgmental society. There are even mobile apps that help us with this; just "Swipe Right." But with our ability to create a pandemic in a matter of moments on social media, the damage we do to someone's reputation is not much different from a wild fire. Some small spark can turn into an out of control inferno and as it spreads, everyone seems to enjoy throwing gas on the fire. Despite our "best intentions," once started a fire may be extinguished but its damage will last forever.

Ok here goes....

As a routine part of my job working as a government contractor and minority business owner, I had the fun job of on-boarding new employees with the help of our director of human resources. Together we would input all the demographics of each new hire into the various applications used to track time management, payroll, health insurance, etc... The process sucked, but thankfully only took thirty minutes for each new hire. The only saving grace was that I was able to catch up with our HR Director whom I considered a good friend. We naturally turned a thirty-minute task into an hour shooting the shit as we worked.

On one of these sessions we were just starting to input a new employee's information, starting with his name and address, and I paused while typing it into the database. Kristen, my HR director, asked me what was wrong. I told her I think I know this guy, well sort of know this guy. His address and last name was one I would never forget.

It was a very cold December evening about ten years earlier. I was at home in bed with my wife, sound asleep. I lived in a condo in Columbia near the hospital in a small community named Deering Woods. About three o'clock in the morning I was awoken by my fire department pager. It makes an extremely loud audible beeping sound followed by a series of tones that activates the pagers of other stations being called to respond. Lastly, there is a tone that denotes the nature of the call. Rescue or Fire. I would always wake up, but only jumped out of bed for the fire calls as the rescue calls only required the ambulance to respond, which was fully staffed. Besides, at this point I lived in Columbia off Harpers Farm Road, close to the Community College. Logistically, there was no way I would ever be able to make it to the firehouse in time to respond with the ambulance. I would however, meet the ambulance at scenes near Columbia to upgrade their unit to a Paramedic Unit. At that time in Howard County, most of the ambulances only provided Basic Life Support, and a group of Paramedics, like myself, would drive a Suburban Truck loaded with Advanced Life Support equipment, to meet on scene and upgrade should a call be serious enough to require advanced life support. This included cardiac monitoring or defibrillating, starting IV's, and pushing one of forty different type of drugs, controlling an airway with intubation tubes, chest tubes, or other airway adjuncts. Paramedics are like mini doctors, whereas the EMT-B's a kin to being a nurse.

On this frigid evening in December, the call was for a house fire in Highland, Maryland. It is a small community just south of Clarksville where I routinely volunteered. It was a good 20-minute drive under normal circumstance. But at three o'clock in the morning, doing 90mph on Rt. 108, I made it to the fire house in just over 10 minutes, grabbed my gear and jumped on the brush truck with another firefighter that was pulling up in his car right about the same time I did. The weather, in addition to being very cold had also started to drizzle freezing rain. I flipped on the red and white overhead flashing lights, and as I started to pull off the firehouse apron, I saw a couple other volunteers pulling up to staff the reserve engine. At the same time, we heard over the radio, the first responding engine call on-scene, "Heavy smoke and fire showing, dropping a line at the top of the hill." This got our adrenalin pumping. Heavy smoke and fire showing, is a working fire that has been rolling for a while. I stepped up my speed a bit, but as the rain increased so had the roads become ever so slick. Luckily, we knew the area very well, and were pulling up in the brush truck as the first engine began to pull the first line (fire hose) off the side of the fire truck.