Considering my worth as a firefighter.
As the title says I’m royally considering my worth as firefighter. I’m a new probationary firefighter with 7 months and some change into the career. Keeping in mind I’m still new I’ve done pretty well with a good attitude and ready to train and ready to step up when it’s needed. But here lately I’ve had a run of bad luck. I only have two things left in my probationary book to do before I’m off probation and that’s vehicle extrication and ventilation. I’ve had a few calls that make you second guess yourself and keep you up at night at times and a busy life outside of the station. Vertical ventilation has been tough for me because there is always something I screw up or I don’t do it the way someone wants me to do it and it really frustrates me because I want to be better but never seem to get better at it. My issue is heights and the pitch of the roof didn’t make me feel confident in completing the cut but I did my best. I still didn’t get it signed off because I didn’t come off the ladder enough and I accidentally dropped my pike pole through the roof and to the ground floor. Which I will admit was a mistake on my part but atleast it wasn’t the head of it going through the ceiling. I can see the safety concern there. But ultimately I’ve noticed I’m not good at a lot of things, i have things that I feel I did well with my dumb luck. Here a while back I pumped my first house fire and did pretty well at that. But for me the biggest slap in my face personally and although the firefighter who said this meant well was that I was really good at emt skills and medical calls. And it’s cool and all that someone said that but that’s not what I want to be good at. I want to be the firefighter people ask to do stuff like go do search, vehicle extrication, or fire attack or hell even vent. Instead I’m a Probationary Firefighter with limits that I feel hurts my crew and that sucks.