What's Firehouse Talk?

In the firehouse over the course of 18 years I have come to realize that people are willing to talk about anything. Try living together every third day with a different family who has varying political, religious and social views...and each one believes that their view is right. As the years go on you see their kids grow up, you help them move when they relocate, get divorced, and remarried, you attend funerals of their family members, you play golf, basketball and softball together. You work together and get to see all sides of humanity imaginable from joy to sadness, from laughter to complete terror. When these moments take place you return to the firehouse........and talk. What went wrong? What went right? How can we do better? Sorry for stealing your IV!!
At the firehouse, there is always coffee. Not great coffee but hot black like liquid that we drink. At my house, we sit around our boat that we use for water rescue, drink coffee....and talk. Often the conversation is surface talk, but just as often it is about our individual lives. If we took a poll of our wives I believe that most of them would say that we love our job more than we love them. For some that may be a correct statement and for others, we just love what we do. We love the working atmosphere, the guys we work with and all the cool toys we get to play with. I mean, come on, if you had the opportunity to cut a car in half, a new car, with leather interior and all the bells and whistles, wouldn't you try it? Okay, what if they paid you to do it? And what if they paid you to sleep? Wouldn't you at least try that? Once? What if you could work with some of the best people in the world who are willing to do anything for you? Wouldn't you at least give it a try?
Well, that is what I have done for the last 18 years and I have realized that much of my time has been given to simply talking. Many conversations about absolutely everything that you could imagine. That is Firehouse Talk. I will explain more later because there is more that I want to talk about.