Delusional ambo fantasies

Over at grex.org, tfurrows wrote in the not-too-distant past[1] about how much

he appreciated xmanmonk's candor and openness in phlogging about his mental

health issues, and more broadly about how whereas "mainstream social media"

encourages people to adopt a sterile mask of acceptable behaviour and to strive

to represent some kind of shared ideal, the smaller and richer community

forming in gopherspace (which Ze Libertine Gamer also recently wrote about [2])

seems to geature much more honest, open, raw - in a word, I guess, intimate -

sharing between people.

Slugmax's recent post[3] is another shining example of this kind of raw openness,

wherein he discusses some of the harrowing experiences he had dealing with death

in his former career as an EMT.

That post struck a bit of a chord with me because I have in the past maintained

a kind of strange fantasy of becoming an EMT (I actually don't know if this is

the official term in Australia or if we have some other name for them - if

forced to choose something for formal writing for an Aussie audience I think I

would probably go with "ambulance officer", but in all honesty everybody just

calls them "ambos", and this is so widespread that it almost doesn't even feel

colloquial anymore), for reasons which were largely selfish and I now realise

also pretty dellusional.

I do research in academia, and not the kind of research that has even some small

chance of one day leading to a cure for cancer or unlimited clean energy or

anything like that, but rather the kind of stuff that rewards the strong drive

to understand the world around us and our place in it that some people to seem

to have, while at the end of the day probably not actually measurably improving

anybody's life in what many would accept as a "real way" (the positive upside to

this is that I'm also certainly not actively and directly making anybody's life

worse). I sometimes go through periods where I really am wracked with guilt

over this. I certainly don't think of myself as wealthy, but I also definitely

get paid better to work in a relatively relaxed environment at something which,

arguably "doesn't really matter" than plenty of people who have to put on

uncomfortable uniforms and turn up somewhere at 9am on the dot without fail

doing something which people would actually notice the absence of.

Maybe I wouldn't feel bad about this if I was working at my dream job, the one

thing in life I wanted to do more than anything else, but I'm honestly not.

Like many people, I imagine, I have followed a somewhat random and opportunistic

career path, taking chances as they came up. I honestly do enjoy my work during

the good periods, but I also don't doubt that there are plenty of totally

unrelated jobs I would enjoy doing roughly as much, and a lot of those would

probably make me feel a little more useful to society as a whole. Certainly I

don't think many could realistically make me feel less useful.

When I am experiencing the worst of these guilty periods I sometimes fantasise

about rebooting my life, and for a while now one of my go to dreams has been

becoming an ambo. Literally saving lives is the kind of thing that only the

most delusional, jaded and cynical person could question the worthiness of, so

in some sense this would propel me from one end of that spectrum to the other,

and if you're going to daydream about fixing something that makes you feel bad

you might as well go hard. Of course an awful lot of careers would represent a

similar improvement in this regard. But I like to think of myself as having a

logical, systematic mind with good problem solving skills, and I imagine EMT

work would exercise these skills a lot and keep that part of me feeling

satisfied. I probably owe a lot of this line of thinking to listening to /

reading a lot about Bil Herd's life. Bil is a self-taught electrical engineer

who worked at Commodore during its later days, and mostly famously designed

the Commodore 128. He is fairly active these days in the electronics hobbyist

community (see c128.com, and there is a good interview with him on the Amp

Hour podcast [4]), and seems a pretty cool dude. He also has an extensive

medical background (I think originally from training as a medic in the National

Guard) and has worked as a volunteer EMT before. I find it pretty impressive

that somebody can have attained these levels of skill in two totally separate

professional paths. Anyway, he has spoken before about how working as an EMT

involves the same kind of thought processes as debugging computer hardware,

except with the additional twist of having a race-against-time factor, where you

have to figure out what's wrong and what to do to fix it before the guy who

overturned his car on the turnpike bleeds out.

Reading a bit about the things Slugmax actually had to see and do in his career,

and about how burnout after a very short time relative to other careers is

common for EMTs, I have come to realise how distorted and self-serving my view

of that job as "smart people pushing their brains to the limit under time

pressure to save lives" was, and frankly I feel like a bit of an asshole for

thinking that way. It does not sound like a line of work to enter into lightly

at all, and certainly not for the sake of making you feel better about yourself.

Hell, after reading that Slugmax was almost sued by the family of a person he

tried unsuccessfully to save the life of, it doesn't even sound like a surefire

way of making sure everybody appreciates what you do.

Anyway, thanks to Slugmax for his efforts to save both lives and gopherspace

by writing about it.

[1] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/afa_puttingon.txt

[2] gopher://zelibertinegamer.me:70/0/phlog/2017-09-26_1904.txt

[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/slugmax/phlog/tales-of-a-former-paramedic

[4] https://theamphour.com/222-an-interview-with-bil-herd-zany-z80-zygology/