I think that the requirement to ride for years as a Basic is asinine, silly and is blatantly the sort of protectionism that a civil-service bureaucracy adopts to keep outsiders out, insiders in and promote The Way. It's not wrong, but it does illustrate quite clearly to me that ATCEMS wants a certain type of employee- one that does not often question or seek to improve (or test improvements), one who is predictable and always looks within the box for answers and who is loyal because they have invested a lot in getting to their level. If it were truly progressive, that would be one thing, but the ATCEMS system is a high-functioning normal one.
Their recruiting is designed to get the new, the extremely humble and the extreme perfectionists. That's not a bad goal, but it does mean that everyone who comes in there is trained essentially identically, presents a similar range of solutions and acts fairly similarly. Not bad from an operating perspective, but demonstrates the sort of inflexible thinking I would not thrive in. I sense several of the likes this may get feel the same.
It's somewhat of a conundrum- private services have a massive amount of potential to do great, innovative things, but are hamstrung by a broken business model and regulations that make innovation dangerous and difficult unnecessarily and an industrial culture that tends to kick innovation in the face by driving off those passionate, intelligent and motivated to innovate on a small scale (an innovative desert) while government services that have all of the protections, incentive and need in the world to innovate often sit complacently and complain about the status quo.
Me? Tired of making less than $50,000 a year, tired of diabetes-inducing street-corner posting, tired of looking for county services that try to be everything except a fire department and end up acting like Delta Force but performing like the Keystone Kops, getting tired of private EMS where quarterly profit margins are more important than employee health andsafety.
