Off Duty but still concerned?

[LifeAlert101]

Hey guys! So I was just curious to see how many of you listen to whats going on in your city using either a radio or the tool Broadcastify while you're not on duty. I learned that a lot of my fire house friends like to just keep Broadcastify open on their phones when they're off duty just to stay in the loop.

 

[reaper]

When I clock out, I am off duty. You make this your life and you will burn out.

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[redundantbassist]

I honestly couldn't care less what happens at work when i'm not at work.

 

[NysEms2117]

As others say. Separate work and home. I don't do anything regarding work at home. If I absolutely need to, I walk outside or leave. It's just not healthy otherwise

 

[DrParasite]

If I hear a major incident occurring where I work, I might turn on broadcastify because I'm nosey (and we do recalls for major incidents once they are confirmed). I do the same thing when my old FD gets a fire. Then again, if I can't sleep, I might put on the NYPD Special Ops channel, or FDNY city wide channel as background noise.

Or if I want to be entertained, I put on Newark (NJ) PD, they are usually really good for a laugh.

But no, I don't own any radios or scanners, and I don't listen to any apps simply in case something happens.

 

[luke_31]

Off duty is off duty. Unless the SHTF, I don't worry about what is going on. If it's bad enough it will make the news or more likely I'll get a phone call from a supervisor asking me to report back to work, to assist with the incident.

 

[VentMonkey]

There is A LOT to be said about personal health and well-being; all I got.

 

[DrParasite]

By the way, there are several news services that are tailor made and monitored by scanner heads (and usually firefighters) who will notify you about an incident in the area of your choosing....

http://breakingnewsnetwork.com/
http://www.1rwn.com/
http://carolinasfirepage.com/
http://www.metrofire.org/
http://www.newenglandfirenews.com/
http://www.providencecitywide.com/

and I am sure there are more, but those were ones I found using a quick google search.

you have to pay for most of them (its usually a nominal fee to support their services), but if you want to know what's happening in an area, and don't want to be glued to a scanner or radio 24/7, this might be a good option for you, depending on where you live and what their coverage area is.

I won't encourage or discourage their use, but I do think that listening to radios and scanners 24/7 will cause a decrease in your mental aptitude.

 

[planetmike]

To stay in the loop? Any juicy calls I'll hear about the next time I'm at the station. There's no need to listen in on the radio when off duty, that's just asking for headaches from your family/friends.

 

[DesertMedic66]

I could really care less what is going on when I am off duty. There could be an MCI going on and I wouldn’t listen to anything. If there is an incident on a huge scale then we will get phone calls from Dispatch and supervisors.

The only time I will listen to the scanner is when there is a wild land fire in my city. That is just to keep up to date on where it is, road closures, and evac areas.

 

[Summit]

Anything interesting I'll hear about later. I'll only listen to the radio to figure out when a road closure might end or if SHTF.

 

[GMCmedic]

Since my volunteer FD and my EMS employer use the same system for paging out runs, I hear most of the EMS runs if my pager is on open frequency, which is rare.

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[hometownmedic5]

My quiet weeks are 72 hours. 84 is typical, 96 becoming a far to regular thing. My point is, I spend the better part of a hundred hours a week listening to 1-3 radios, sometimes all at once(agency, FD, PD). When I'm at home, the last thing in the world I want to listen to is a radio.

I have a scanner. I'd have to chisel the dust off of it, but I can't rightly say I don't own one. If there is a major incident in my town, where I both live and work, and this incident has the capacity to change the course of my day, and I am notified by other means that it is taking place, I might flip on a radio. Short of the nuclear power plant going up or the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse, no I don't scan.

 

[EpiEMS]

I have a local twitter that alerts of major incidents...so I can stay away from them.

 

[Akulahawk]

I do own a scanner but it no longer "works" for the radio system locally for EMS purposes as that part of the system was "rebanded" and went to a P25 digital system. My scanner is good but it's not a P25-capable scanner as it doesn't do digital. If something seems to be going that I need to know about, I'll turn on Broadcastify and use that. That service has both "sides" of the Fire/EMS dispatch around here so I won't miss much if I need to listen in.

I did use both Broadcastify and my HT ham rig to listen to a couple very large fires that happened near my previous workplace last year... helped tremendously hearing they were closing my primary route to work. Other than that kind of stuff, I don't really listen to "work stuff" much.

 

[Tigger]

There were a bunch of city engines across the street last night so I turned it on to see what was up, just curious really. I leave my active911 by accident a lot and when it goes off I might look and see where they're running to.

 

[Jim37F]

At my last company, we didn't have in rig radios with the fire department but the company actually sold little scanner radios (technically capable of two way, but the way they were programmed it was scanner only), for those of us who liked the extra situational awareness (Their dispatch was the ones who actually talked to the callers, so just listening in to their dispatch talking to the engines/quints/squads you'd hear updates before they called our dispatch). I have been known to have kept mine on whilst driving home, mostly out of simply overlooking turning it off lol but a couple of times I heard a TC or something get dispatched on the freeway I was planning on driving down to get home, allowing me to take a different route home to avoid the inevitable looky loo traffic. Aaaaaand to be perfectly honest after a shift or two that was a stand up 24 I may or may not have heard "Rescue 41's" on the radio as I was leaving the station and laughed "ha, not it! A/B Shift can do some work for a change....." And if I forgot to turn it off once at home to plug into the charger that quickly changed as I really didn't care much for what banality County was talking about when there's a perfectly good tv in the house.

 

[StCEMT]

I opened one once to see if they actually worked, after that I wasn't curious anymore. I am hitting 10+ calls a day just on my own, I don't care what I miss when I am off.

 

[agregularguy]

Where I work now, and my previous paid agency I would never ever listen off duty. As others before, if I wanted to hear about a cool call, I'd hear about it the next day. However, my little brother recently started with the volunteer fire department I "grew up" or first started in, and I happen to get the dispatch texts for them still. So if they have a major incident, and I happen to be home with nothing better to do, I might throw that on for a bit but otherwise when I'm home I don't listen at all.

 

[NomadicMedic]

I don't live in the county where I work, so no interest. However, I am a bit of a radio geek and have several. I just don't listen all that often. Most of them are for Event work. I rent radios to many of the events in town.