Am I the only one who thinks the following email message that was forwarded to me is HILARIOUS?
“To All:
At the request of the American Red Cross in Greater New York, as of 3:30 this afternoon ARES was placed on stand-by. The Red Cross has informed me that, after meeting with NYC officials, there is a possibility of power outages occuring in sections of the City due to the extremely high demand for, and usage of, electricity. Should an outage occur, we will need operators to act as communications support for some of the borough Chapter offices to provide a link to the EOC at Red Cross HQ in Manhattan.
Please be advised that this is NOT – NOT – NOT an activation! This is only a heads-up to the membership that we may be needed should an emergency occur. Please have your equipment ready to go, and make certain that you either talk to your borough EC first, or obtain information from the Citywide net that will be held on the Citywide frequencies (CityWide 1, 2 or 3) BEFORE YOU DEPLOY! I repeat – PLEASE DO NOT EVER SELF-DEPLOY!.”
1. I can smell all the sweaty, musty reflective vests coming out of the closet already as hammies break out the ancient HTs and hardhats.
2. Isn’t it sad that the ARES coordinator (or section manager, or whatever he’s called) needs to state MULTIPLE times that this is not an activation and to NOT self-deploy? I guess that means they’ve had fully vested-out ARES members show up on the scene before, ordering emergency staff around?
ARES: “Hi. I’m from ARES. And I’m here to take over communications.”
Real Emergency Worker: “Sure thing. You go stand over there next to the guys from RISAR.“
Richard…
That message *rules*.
The writer is *pleading* with his members to avoid some sort of incident that seems to have happened in the past. You can tell that the writer had tears in his eyes when he wrote that.
“Please don’t self-deploy. Oh God, please don’t self-deploy… for the love of all that’s good and right, PLEASE DON’T SELF DEPLOY. Again. Let’s not have a repeat of last time.”
Like you said, I envision 20 fat ARES members pounding on the door of the local dispatch centre.
“Do not taunt the dynamite monkey”
I guess the local ARES group in NYC has previously been ’embarr ass ed” by their members under self deployment.
Do ya think they will get in the way for the next 45 years too!
BTW, talked with an EMS guy in Toronto last night, at the local watering hole, Tim Horton’s, and they do not like the ARES whacker teams getting in the way.