What's Next?

In the first episode of Second Alarm, I share how I found my way into the fire service, what the last 15 years have meant to me, and why I've started asking a question I never thought much about when I first put on the uniform: What's next?

From starting out as a nervous rookie to becoming a lieutenant, the fire service has become a huge part of who I am. But with retirement getting closer, I'm beginning to think about life beyond the station—another career, more time with family, and figuring out how to keep making a difference when the firehouse is no longer part of my everyday life.

I don't have all the answers, and that's exactly why I started this podcast.

Second Alarm is about life, work, and what comes after the firehouse. We'll talk about the job, leadership, family, retirement, second careers, the good times, the hard times, and everything in between.

This is the beginning of that journey.

Welcome to Second Alarm.

Transcript

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Every firefighter answers the first alarm. But eventually, we all have to figure out what comes after. This is second alarm. I'm your host, Josh. I've spent 15 years in the fire service. Got into this job right out of high school. And honestly, I never really expected to be doing it 15 years later. At one point, I thought I'd probably end up in the military. Instead, I joined a volunteer fire department. And about a little over a year later, I went ahead and decided this is something I wanted to make a career out of. And, you know, here I am. I'm now a lieutenant. Spent most of my adult life in the fire service. I've made lifelong friends, you know, seen some things I'll never forget. And I've had some incredible experiences. Also had some experiences that made me question uh whether I wanted to keep doing this. Now I'm at a point where I'm starting to ask myself a question that I never really thought I'd ever have to ask. What's next? Because I know I can retire in in just a few years or in about five years in 2031. But you know the truth is I'm not sure I'm ready just to stop working. I still want to make a difference. I want to feel useful. I still want to have something that gets me up in the morning. So that's really why I'm doing this. So I got into the fire service. I actually got into the fire service right out of high school. And throughout my high school being in high school, I always wanted to be in the military. That's just where I thought I'd end up going. Uh and for some reason I decided to join a volunteer department. I mean, I already had an EMS license, figured I'd try it out. Spent about a year or so there in my local fire service or my local fire department. They were uh they had some tryouts. So I went and tried out. Uh I didn't get in the first time. Tried out a few more times than that, finally got hired on. And uh my my brother kind of helped a lot with that because he was already at this department. So I knew a lot of the guys and it's kind of what uh made it feel like a natural fit, you know. I didn't just walk out of high school and say, you know, I'm gonna spend the next 15, 20 years as a career fireman. It's kind of just something I grew into. You know, my first day on the on the truck, not even on the truck, just showing up. I finished the academy, showed up for my first shift, and then back then when when I got on, it was 24 hours on, 48 hours off, which which now we're 4896, you know, 48 hours on, 96 hours off, which I kind of like. We're a busier department, but not super busy where the 4896 messes with us at all. But on that first day, I was pretty nervous. No, I didn't know everyone there, didn't know how things were gonna go. Just kind of getting into it. I was definitely overwhelmed. There's a lot, there's just a lot to do, a lot to take in. And that's also why I was kind of excited. There's just so much there. I was just trying to figure stuff out, and as I walked in, I got to meet the uh the acting battalion chief at the time and the uh the lieutenant we had at that station. They kind of walked me around, they showed me where I'd be staying in my rooms or in the room, kind of gave me a breakdown of where everything was, how the station worked. Pretty much, you know, just what's expected of me, what's expected of the rookie. And and I just had no idea what I was even getting myself into. You know, I kind of thought I would know, and then when I showed up, I I just didn't know. Looking back now, it's pretty crazy to think about how much has changed since that first day. Kind of now, you know, the firehouse becomes another family, you know, and with that, you know, how they become another family. We weren't all the best friends. Not all of us got along, and and a lot of these people probably I probably wouldn't choose to hang out with outside of the station. When one of us needed something, most of the time everyone was there. We're all there. You know, and that's kind of what being at a firehouse means, you know. Is that when one of us needs something where we all show up, we all help. You know, that's what I thought it was back then. The long shifts, you know, we got to know each other pretty well. The kitchen table, dinner time, you know, that's kind of where we figured everything out. That's where we got to know each other the best. We'd laugh, argue, we'd we'd start dealing with the difficult calls, kind of even get to see each other at our best and our worst. Kind of the main point of this, you know, the fire service just isn't a job. It's an environment, a community that becomes part of our identity. You know, and then just kind of moving forward from there, I was a fireman for a while, and then the department we have, we have our our ranks break up as fireman, uh driver, and then up to a lieutenant. So from Firefighter, when I moved into being a driver, I had learned, you know, just working under some of the other drivers, just how I wanted to be, how I should learn the job, how I should learn the districts that I'm gonna be in, how I should learn that truck. Uh, there's definitely a few people I worked under that that taught me how to how to be a good one. Um, how to how to handle the pump panel when we had multiple uh lines off the truck, how to handle situations that I didn't think would arise. No, is you know, we lost our hydrant. Now what do I do? Um seems like some simple stuff, but when you know when you're when you're in the moment and that happens, it kind of throws you for a loop. It's kind of weird, you know, from being a fireman, you move up and you promote to a driver or engineer and somebody else's departments probably call it that. Moving from that back seat to the to the front seat's definitely a big change. You know, you're not the officer of the truck yet, but you're definitely in charge and responsible for everything in that truck and everyone that's in it. So it was definitely a big responsibility change. When I first got up there, I didn't know I was gonna be quite ready for it. And that actually worked out pretty well. Now, as I was a driver, got to work with some with some really good lieutenants and some that were just honestly downright horrible to be around. I hated working with some of these guys. But I also learned that with the good lieutenants, you know, I learned of what I should do, how I should move my career forward, and and how I would want to be as a lieutenant. And then with those horrible guys, you know, those guys are just downright shitty. And I was just like, I don't want to be like these guys. This is not how I'm gonna be. And and sometimes that's just how you learn. Just you learn how to lead. You you see some people do it wrong. You you know, you watch the lieutenant that's above you, and how he did it wrong, and you're gonna remember that. And and that's kind of what made me want to move up. Is I see these guys leading. See, I see these officers or lieutenants leading these guys or attempting to lead these guys into something when those guys themselves don't know what they're doing. And and I think it's kind of what I figured out. I wasn't gonna do it the way they were doing it, and I wanted to move up because I wanted to make make some of these guys better, but not only make these guys better, I wanted to be better myself. It was a fun, it was a fun journey up to being that lieutenant, going from driver to I was a driver for three, four years before I moved up to being an officer. And and when I promoted, you know, and this is a question I probably should have been asking myself before I pro I took that officer exam and I promoted is you know, what kind of lieutenant do I want to be? But it's also where I get to where I learn from some of those guys that that I worked under is some of these guys they led really good. And I'll talk about one. He he was real good about working on the on the pumps on these trucks when we would replace our valves. And he he eventually moved up to a battalion chief while I was working under him. And when he would want something done, he wouldn't just call us and be like, hey, go get this done right now, call me when it's done. It was it wasn't that that type of guy. He would show up to our station with the tools, with the parts, and be like, hey guys, we let's go out here, let's get these things changed. And a lot of times it was mainly the valves on the pump. But this guy would take off the white, white shirt, put on some work clothes, and he would be in there changing that pump uh or the valve with us, excuse me. And I learned from him a lot on that's how I wanted to lead. I didn't want to just go in there and start telling the guys, this is what you need to do and this is how it's gonna be done, and then go sit on my ass. I wanted to be in there and I wanted to be helping these guys. I wanted to show them that I I knew what I was doing and I could help them along the way and I could coach them to make them better. Then after that, you know, the station life kind of gets different. You go from being like a rookie fireman, even a rookie driver, you're still new, you know, those first that first one to five years, you're still kind of learning. You're still pretty green, and you still still got a lot of learning to do. And then when you when you move up to the officer position, the station life kind of changes a little bit. You went from being the new guy, the rookie, the proby, you know, whatever you want to call it, to now I'm the officer and I'm in charge of all these guys. So, so me, my station, I had a rookie fireman and a guy who just finished his rookie year and became a driver. So I'm like, shit, dude, I'm responsible for these guys. Now I need to like I gotta figure out a way to help coach these guys up to what I want. And for me, it got kind of got lucky because these guys, they weren't idiots. They knew what to do. So it was fairly easy for me to get to get them moved up. And then the station life, the camaraderie we had um with us three in that station, it was it was amazing. Everything everything worked out really well. We had very good routines. We all knew what each one was responsible for, what we did. Uh, you know, and just some of the conversations we'd have, it's it's pretty funny. I probably shouldn't get into some of those, but but it was it's fun, you know. And just our day-to-day, it's it's unpredictable of what we're gonna run into. Whether it'd be call, a call that we have, something at the station, or one of the guys just being dicks. Sometimes that sometimes that happens, and it's that's what makes station life honestly really fun, is that every day is gonna be unpredictable. And we get those, you know, those day-to-day mundane calls, just the person who calls 911 every day, every day, and we know the time that they're gonna call. It's just, you know, it kind of runs us into the ground that that we kind of get excited, you know, as bad as that is to say when someone calls 911 and wants our help. What a that, you know, we get excited for that sometimes when someone actually needs help and we get to to be the crew that we trained for, that we trained with essentially, and how we trained with each other, we now we get to use those skills on a call. And and I think a lot of that, you know, your station life, your camaraderie, um, how you guys get along, how you know, how the crews work together, that's kind of what keeps people in this profession, right? And even with all of our personalities and types of disagreements that we would have, there's just something special about being part of a crew. Once you're part of a good crew, a good team, you don't want to leave that. And talking about this, you know, there are still things about this job I'm gonna miss. And when I when I just finally decide to leave, I'm definitely gonna miss some of this. So let's look at the other side of the job. You know, we talked, kind of went over quickly about station life, you know, moving up from fireman to driver to an officer or lieutenant, talked about, you know, how the just the environment of station life, just how the guys get along. But now let's look at the other side of the job. Let's shift the tone a little bit. Let's look at the hard parts. You know, the calls. It's not one call essentially gets you. It's the call after call after call. And it might not even be a traumatic call. It's the same bullshit we go to, you know, 2.30 in the morning, we've had a busy day, it's hot, we finally get to bed. Now at 2.30 in the morning, this lady's calling, or this guy's calling because they need help just moving something, or because they're like, I'm not sure if I can if I can get out of bed, so I need help. And it's just, you know, it's just the same bullshit over and over again. And I'm not saying these people don't need help, but it comes down to some people just being helpless for themselves. They're they're plenty capable of doing it, but they got so used to to us showing up just to help them that they just like, well, I'm gonna call. I'm gonna be lazy. And you know, we have that call three or four times. We just got to deal with just idiot people. And then we go to someone's house who actually needs our help, and we're assholes. And we're and we're not trying to be that, you know. But sometimes that just gets to us. And then we have the shifts where we have trauma call, trauma call, trauma, you know, cardiac arrest, we have wrecks, extrications. We have all this shit that we see and that we have to somehow work with. And and someone kind of put this pretty well. I don't remember where I heard it from, probably from a few different places, but just imagine a backpack you're wearing. And every call you go on, you add a rock to the backpack. And eventually that backpack's gonna get too hard to carry. It's gonna be it's gonna be heavy, and everything's just gonna spill out of it at one time. And that's what these calls do. So we have bad call, bad call, bad call, and then we go home. And us, like myself, guys that have a family, it's hard for us just to you know hit that switch and turn that off. Like, how are we supposed to do that? We're bringing that home and we're we're giving it to our family essentially. And then we just go back for our next shift and do it all over again. And then we're expected to give all these other calls 100% when we had to run bullshit after bullshit after bullshit, and then we have all these traumatic calls and it just adds on to us. And then we go home again. Same stuff at home, you know. We're might not be the nicest people to our wives, husbands, kids, family. Then we go to the call or we go back to work and we have the same calls again. It's just over and over and over. Yeah, necessarily that is what we signed up for, but some of it's not. And then, you know, we're three months ahead onto the next call, but there's still a call in our head that really just it messed with us a little bit because it filled our backpack up essentially. So now we're dealing with a call that we're still thinking about, but we're expected to be 100% again at the call three months later. Getting at that, you know, we just guys need to figure out uh ways to uh to handle that. And that's where us as officers come in. We need to help help these guys. We need to coach these guys into that and explain to them, you know, that everyone's gonna need to talk, everyone's gonna need some help, as much as some of us don't want to do it, myself included, I hate doing it. I hate talking to guys about you know my feelings. So I don't. That's that's where the kitchen table kind of comes in, where we can all kind of discuss things with each other. You know, we can just discuss, you know, the constantly changing rules of the department, uh expectations they keep changing and putting on uh shift personnel. Our leadership, our chiefs, our administration, they're not always following the same standards that they set for us, you know. Rules for thee, not for me. Everyone knows those guys. And then and then what's the effect that has on morale? Yeah, that's all stuff that we talk about at that kitchen table and and more. So what happens to morale when people making the rules don't seem to live by the same rules? You know, that that can be a pretty big conversation. And I'm sure in one of these next episodes we might we might actually be getting into that. So kind of moving on, yeah. I only have 15 years in. Not the most experienced guy, I'm not the newest guy. But at some point we all we all start thinking about this, you know, is retirement. I'm on a 20-year retirement plan. And I never thought at 20 years I'd be ready to leave. But now I'm at year 15, and just some of the crap that goes on here is just it wears on you pretty heavy. And I can essentially I'm eligible for retirement in 2031, five years away. But retirement's not the only reason what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about what's next, but not not just about retirement. I've been passed over for so many promotions, just over some, just over some bullshit, you know. And I try not to let that anger me too much or get under my skin. But just some of the reasons that they happen, it's just kind of disappoints me a lot and frustrates me. Kind of makes me question myself, did I did I do something wrong? Am I not doing everything I should be? Even though I am doing everything I should be, and I'm doing it pretty well from what I think and from what I've been told. But why should I continue to chase this next promotion? Like, is it even worth it? The amount of stress. Anyone who's tried to promote from a company officer or a captain up to a chief position, they know how stressful it is. It sucks. But what else is out there, you know? I've started opening up and and looking out past where I'm at now instead of just trying to stay stuck here. And I don't hate the job. And it's not that I can't wait to leave. I'm just starting to wonder if there's something else I should be doing with the next part of my life. And that's coming up pretty quick. And for the guys, if if you're listening to this that are just going into the into the profession of firefighting, it's one of the best jobs in the world. And and I would I love it. And I'll never, I say I never want to change, but look at me now, I kind of want to change. I'm ready to, I'm 15 years in, I want to leave. And not necessarily leave. I the department, I love where I'm at. I love the crew I'm with, I love my station, but just little things just over and over and over again. It's just kind of just kind of makes you feel like shit, you know. Just same thing happening over and over again. You know, some other possible directions that I that I'm considering is, you know, the medical field. Mainly the medical field, because I'm already a paramedic. You know, I got that. I got my intermediate license, so it's I don't know how it how it differs from state to state here, but in the state I'm in, you know, we have EMT basic, EMT intermediate, which is now called AEMT, and we have paramedic. So I essentially got my EMT intermediate in 2000, at the end of 2010, and went to medic school in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. So that was that was an experience all of its own, but we can get into that in another episode. But some of the directions I was thinking of going, you know, we're gonna go into another part of the medical field, start teaching. I've taught a lot of EMS classes, uh, fire classes, and I love it. Or even going into safety. Um, all of a lot of us who worked in the fire service for so long, we know that safety is a big deal, and we're we're pretty good in it for the most part, so why not move into something like that? Or I can even go into another public uh career, and more than likely there's something I haven't discovered yet. But but the big issue is I'm not just simply wanting to find a paycheck. I I want something I can still make a difference. I want to feel like I'm contributing to something still, you know. Like as firemen, we contribute to the public. The public loves us. We we're making a difference somewhere in someone's life, and I I want to continue doing that. And I'm also very excited, like I'm scared for retirement, but I'm excited for it because I get to spend so much time, so much more time with my family. My kids are still gonna be very young when I'm able to retire. But I'm also nervous about that, you know. Like, what am I gonna do every day if I don't have a job to go to? I've spent most of my adult life doing something. It's starting to get hard to imagine who I'm gonna be when when something's not there anymore. So if I'm not a firefighter anymore or a fireman, then who am I? And that's probably definitely gonna be a recurring question that we that we hear, you know. Who am I? So why does this podcast exist? You know, why why is second alarm? Why does this exist? If you bring everything I talked about together, you know, it's the station life, the early life of the career, why I'm wanting to leave, just just some small examples of that that I talked about and what's next, you know. That's what second alarm is about. It's about life, work, and what comes after the firehouse. What are we doing after we leave that firehouse? I I don't have the answers. I'm I'm trying to find them, you know, and this and that's kind of what I want to talk about. Let's let's find some answers. And I'm sure there's other firemen out there that are asking the same questions. And I and you know, and I I've had conversations with guys who are approaching retirement, guys who have already who have already retired, and guys who just quit and left the fire service in general. They started another career, or they stayed in public service. I know guys who left uh the fire department after just a few years in and went to the police department, to the sheriff's office. You know, we always have those guys, but they still stayed in public service, or they just went off and found something completely different. We have a guy who left the career and went started or left the fire career and went and started a successful uh construction company. And I want to hear, I want to talk to those guys some more and you know, what did they learn? And and if I can figure this out for myself by talking to them, maybe I can help someone else who's trying to figure it out too. You know, and that's that's the mission is not only want to help myself. This isn't just about me. I want to help others too. It's kind of getting into it. What can everyone can expect from this podcast? A lot of what we're going to talk about, it's life in the fire service, some leadership, uh, retirement, you know, second careers, our family, our identity, the good calls, bad calls, the funny and difficult stuff that we talk about, the guys who left, the guys who stayed, and and everything that happens in between that. And I'm gonna talk to some more, I'll probably have some guys come on here with me, some other firefighters, some guys who've retired, some good leaders that I know. And and maybe I'll have I'll see if I can get some of the guys who've just quit and moved into a completely different career, went a whole other path. I don't know exactly where this journey is gonna take me myself, you know. And honestly, that's kind of the point. Is let's talk about it. Let's answer some of our own questions and let's figure out where we're gonna go. Where where is this gonna take us? So kind of come up to the end here. If if if you're listening to this and you're a fireman or anyone in the fire service who's starting to wonder what's next, maybe you're getting close to retirement. Maybe you've only been on the job for a few years. You're still a rookie. You're wondering where this career is going to take you. Maybe you're already retired and you're trying to figure out what life looks like now. Or maybe you're not even in the fire service. Maybe you're just at a point in your life where you're asking yourself the same question. I'm asking my that I'm asking myself what's next? And I don't have that answer yet. But I'm gonna find it. I'm gonna find that answer. And hopefully, somewhere along the way of this, we can all help each other and figure it out. Well now, this is second alarm. Life work, what comes after the firehouse. I'm Josh. Thanks for listening.