Disorderlies

Wow. At the CPAT practice this weekend the inmates were pretty much running the asylum. And by inmates, I mean us candidates. And by asylum, I mean the whole frickin' test.

With less than a month until the real CPATs are given, I expected to roll up to the training facilities and see a swarm of firefighters and candidates ready to administer and practice the CPAT respectively. When I got there, there must have been 30-40 firefighters already, but I was one of the first couple of candidates. It was still pretty early, so I thought for sure there would be dozens more showing up later for one of the last couple practices. Yeah, um, not so much.

There ended up being about 10 of us ready to practice, and so all those firefighters were sent off to do various assignments. None of which included setting up or administering the CPAT. We waited around while they fumbled through a bunch of stuff trying to set everything up all bass ackwards.

Finally it got to the point that 3 of us said "Fuck it. At this point we can probably do this just as well as they can." So we started setting up, finding equiment, getting guys ready, and even started to proctor the damned thing ourselves. We reset sections of the course when it needed to be done, got everyone into and out of their weight vests, and did everything that was supposed to be done for us. 'Cause hey, it needed to be done.

And the proctor they finally did get to guide us? I'd been through the course more times than he had. Seriously, he'd never done it before. There was one point where he just stopped what he was doing and started doing something else, so I just went on with out him until he caught back up to me. I was half waiting for a "What'd I miss?", but it never came. Guess he just figured I knew what I was doing, or he just really didn't give enough of a shit to ask. Although it was nice to have a bit of a musical soundtrack to accompany my run, seeing as how he was wearing an iPod the whole damned time.

And as a result of all this chaos and mass confusion, my times (along with everyone else's) sucked ass. No one could focus on the job at hand, as we were all still frazzeled from the bad start and things like the ladder that's supposed to be raised still being raised instead of in its proper position: on the ground (that'd be on my first run). Luckily, though my pride was wounded from lack of a speedy clearing of the course, I still did complete both runs and had to make due with the fact that despite the interference, I finished in time.

Yay, I guess.

D