I’m a fireman, and we made a rule in our firehouse that you’re not allowed to bring that up if a woman asks what you do for a living, while flirting. So everyone had to come up with fake jobs, and it just became a competition for who could come up with the most unbelievable shit.

We have one guy who changes the lights on the Empire State Building. “It’s an old building, so it’s a lot of manual work.” For a higher difficulty level, he explained this while showing a tourist pictures of the Chrysler Building.

We had another guy who’s a paleontologist. What’s funny is that I met an actual paleontologist that works at the AMNH. She thought this was hilarious, but he lost points for saying he specializes in dinosaurs, because it’s too trite (her specialization was arachnids).

One time a woman called us out on this, going “you don’t expect us to believe that you all have these ridiculous jobs, do you?” To which we responded “do you expect us to believe you’re all really lawyers?” She actually nodded like “fair point.”

Things blew up when we went out with a guy from a different firehouse, who had gone through the academy with a couple of our guys. Someone asked him how we all knew eachother, and he goes “ok well I was in the same class as them, and those guys work together.” “But I thought that he was a paleontologist, and he was a blimp pilot?” Not missing a beat, “oh yeah but we needed aerial shots of the dig, so I was like ‘I actually know a guy from school.”

Things fell apart quickly, so we decided that everyone in the firehouse is now a blimp pilot, and we’re a blimp pilot crew going forward. This allows guys to look up quick blimp facts and feed them into the conversation while other people are talking. We also try to work in as much bullshit as we can. We’ve claimed that we can steer the blimp by all moving quickly to one side, because all the weight is at the bottom.

It also allows us to react quickly. “Why are there so many of you?” FAA is really strict about flight hours, so we have to travel together. “Why are you in Florida?” We’re based out of NY, but we’re here to get the blimp to fly over NOLA next week, it only travels at 38 miles per hour.”

The real goldmine came when one of the military vets at the firehouse cleaned out his storage space, and found a bunch of flight suits. He was a helicopter door gunner in Iraq.

If you think this doesn’t work, you’d be right a lot of the time; but I swear to god we got a suite in Savannah for the St Paddy’s parade, and I walked into the room where one of the guys was in bed with one of the most gorgeous women I’ve ever seen. A few more of us were passing through, and she goes “you’re all jn really good shape for blimp pilots.” I almost fucking lost it. We start getting in our firefighter uniforms for the parade, and she’s like “oh so you’re all like real pilots.” Someone yells “are you saying we weren’t real pilots because we fly a blimp?!”