I'd be down with another Door War Week.. It's only been 7 years since we thought it was all over..

For a while I was seeing a girl whose husband was a fireman, and she'd see me on nights when her husband was at the firehouse, usually for 72 hours at a time. She said it was all good, that they were in an open relationship but that'd be too distracting for me as the husband, no matter what job I was doing, but especially if I was dealing with peoples' lives, so I said we couldn't do it anymore.

(I'm sure she's fucking somebody else but at least it's not weighing down on my own conscience like it used to).. :(

Zest, if you ever write your memoirs, I'll be first in line for a signed copy.

Hehe I've thought about just copying every comment I've ever written on poeTV and making it into a book with no context; one paragraph is about fucking a fireman's wife and the next is about Steven Universe. Hell, we should all do that! :)

Haha I like to think that the whole firehouse came out that day for sort of a cold audition, and they were like "sorry we only need two of you today, but that's ok don't bother changing, we're in the Golden Hour now folks!"

You regard emergency extraction equipment as a poor substitute for orbital wave-motion cannons?

Presumably, their axes are designed for that sort of usage.

There is a reason they tend to call them 'fire axes' rather than just 'axes'.

Firefighters are pretty awesome. They're one of the few careers that kind of present a challenge to my tendency to push for the complete dismantlement of gender-based inequality in the workplace, to a degree. I think that any woman that can do the job should be able to get the job, but some of the shit firefighters have to do (as this video illustrates) requires such a huge amount of upper body strength that just being able to really do the job is almost 'sexist', on a biological level. The percentage of women that have that upper body strength is just really low, so it's kind of tough to say 'do these requirements for hiring really need to be that high, is that accurate or is it artificial', and be able to get an accurate response given the sorts of crazy shit firefighters might need to get into?

Eh, it's not something I sit around thinking about all the time, and might have come out as nonsensical drivel, but I hope I'm making some sense here? It isn't the first thing that comes to mind whenever I see firefighters or anything, I'm not pathological, I don't think...

If it makes you feel any better, the last time the fire department came to my building the captain was a woman.

She also had to be at least 6'2.

The important thing is to make sure that the tests are as objective as possible. A highly subjective test is vulnerable to gender bias. It's likely that you'll always see fewer women doing stuff like this, but it's important to make sure they are judged on the same criteria as the men so that they won't be rejected solely for their gender.

Having come back and reread my post, I want to clarify, when I say "I think that any woman that can do the job should be able to get the job", I'm referring to firefighting in particular. Though I do think the same of any other job as well, just trying to be clear for this paragraph in particular.