Once a month all employees has a SOC day. SOC is abbreviation for Service On Call, so we are on stand by that day between 7am and 11am. If we have not received an assignment by then we are off for the day. Lately we all have been called in. Yesterday was my SOC day and I got to work one of the trucks in Athens. I didn’t mind that at all, my partner for the day, Alex and I are good friends and always have a blast together. Well this shift was not going to be any different on that point, for sure. And we were lucky. Our first call was a transfer from Athens to Dallas! Some people hates those transfers, I love them. Just nice to see something different, you can eat something in Dallas etc etc. This transfer was going to Baylor Hospital in downtown Dallas. I have been there once before but that was when I was doing clinicals with Hutchins Fire so I wasn’t driving. But believe it or not, I found it!

After we dropped off the patient we needed some gas and food before we headed back to Athens and what wouldn’t be more appropriate than a Buc-Ees stop in Terrell? It is almost a tradition and a must that you have to stop at Buc-Ees to go to the bathroom and take a Beaver Selfie at least!

This call took up 4.5 hours of our shift which was very nice. But yes, we did have 6.5 hours to go. It wasn’t too bad actually. We had two more patients before we had our next interesting call. A fire standby.
There were some conflicting information in the beginning when the call came out. It was clear that it was a trailer on fire on a county road. But wether there was a structure close by or not was a little unclear. Well we headed that way and this is what we saw…

There was a, most likely stolen trailer standing alone on a county road with no houses close but some trees and grass that could catch on fire but there was no car or driver. Some volunteer firefighters had made it to the scene before us but no fire truck so it wasn’t much that could be done. But once the engine came they all went to action, because what is more fun for a fire fighter than a fire?

It wasn’t much left of the trailer when the fire was out. It was up to law enforcement to do their report and investigation to figure out who it belonged to. It looked like it had been on fire for a little while before it got reported so it was really a total loss. Sad.

Well, for us we had burned some more time to our shift and when this call was done we only had 2 hours left. We actually had another call in that span before we could return to the station and go home. It was thou very nice to only do a 12 hour shift that was variating.