I don’t want to make this a habit every time our regular truck goes to the shop for maintenance but…

Remember March 20th when we were in truck 1909 that just died on us in the middle of the street? Well that almost happened again. To follow up with the truck 1909… it actually went back into traffic and about 2 weeks later caught on fire… no one was injured during that incident…
Anyway, yesterday and today we had the pleasure to be in truck 1919. Already when we got in it yesterday the exhaust fumes were extreme! I got a headache from it that I couldn’t get rid of. But the fumes actually stopped when we started rolling so we could fight it out. This morning it wasn’t too bad. But at noon while we were posting the A/C went out. When I am warm my partners are cooking and I was too warm for comfort. So we called the mechanic that would send another truck from Tyler. Well, it was now 1pm and that truck wouldn’t be here before we got off shift. Despite it being hot, we were not allowed to go out of traffic. I prayed that we wouldn’t get a call because there was no A/C for the patient either! The smell of exhaust fumes came back and so did my headache. So we were at our post fighting the heat when our offline supervisor pulled up. He just said “Turn off the truck, there is a huge puddle of radiator fluid underneath you”. Neither me or my partner had been outside the truck, we just had the windows down to get the wind blowing through. Our supervisor couldn’t figure out that we couldn’t smell anything. Well, I could but I honestly didn’t know what it was more than exhaust fumes… So now we were out of traffic. The question was, would we make it back to the station, 1.5 miles down the road. I tried to crank up the truck again and got it going on the second attempt. Then slowly drove back to the station and backed it in. As soon as I hit the road it started warning about low cooling fluid and when I put that truck in park it died. That was it! Our supervisor called the shop and told them that the truck needed to go on a towtruck back to Tyler… Well, it was an hour left of our shift and there was no way we could take any calls.

The night shift thought that they would be out of service for at least an hour until the towtruck came with the replacement. Ha, they were not that lucky. At the same time I left the station, at 4pm the truck pulled up in the parkinglot… another old truck… I wonder how I can get this one out of service if it is still here next week? I don’t think that 1919 will retire, this is probably a fixable problem… but we were joking and saying that when our regular truck is in the shop, I am not allowed to drive, I just put them out of service…