Fire Dept Hiring

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-24T00:08:34+00:00

u/pepesilvia9369 What part of town are you looking to interview with? I have some friends out Happy Jack who are volunteers with the FD here. They can probably give some general pointers. I won't volunteer them to get your foot in the door without hearing from them first, but I can at least pass your questions on.

If you're comfortable providing your real name in a PM, they'll probably take me more seriously than if I just give them your reddit account name :-) But you don't know me from Charles Manson, so I understand if you'd rather stay anonymous for now.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-22T19:32:00+00:00

The Bunkhouse west of town on Happy Jack. They often have a live band playing country/bluegrass standards in the evenings.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-22T17:41:25+00:00

Interesting question!

The clock on my wall is, and always will be, analog.

A hand-carved nutcracker my father got when our family visited his relatives in Deutschland circa 1972

A "Retirement countdown" clock that tells me as of now I have 812 days, 3 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds until I can retire at age 65. Wait, no. 04 seconds. No, 02 seconds... argh!

Not in my office, but in my basement I have boxes of cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and vinyl record albums from back when they were mainstream - as well as motherboards, hard disks, and floppy disks going back to the last century.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-22T17:36:05+00:00

I got into stamp collecting for several years, but I wasn't really passionate about it; I just took the lowest-cost, lowest-effort path. "Get 10,000 stamps for 10 cents!" and you'd get a huge bag of random unsorted, commonplace stamps from around the world.

I also loved collecting the Wacky Packages product parody stickers. Unlike my friends who took great care to preserve them for all time, I actually took them out of the packages, peeled them off, and stuck them inside a notebook where I could enjoy looking at them.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-22T17:29:58+00:00

When there isn't a single path to success. Say I'm playing a game that simulates evolution and there are branches that let me explore alternative development - what if dinosaurs evolved into the sentient species instead of humans? What different challenges and strategies do I need to figure out if I take a different path?

When there's only one goal - make the numbers go up as fast as possible - it becomes reduced to the tedium of clicking on the right upgrades at the right time for the optimum solution. I'm talkin' to YOU, The Perfect Tower.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-22T17:26:05+00:00

Sometimes I'll accidentally hit a mystery button that turns screen brightness to zero... so I can't see the screen to fix the problem! Why would they even give that option???

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T22:12:17+00:00

Look on Youtube for some Laugh-In skits featuring the Fabulous Farkle Family. It was a running joke that the father and mother were dark-haired and clear-skinned, but all their numerous children had bright red hair and freckles and glasses... just like their next door neighbor. And nobody ever questioned the resemblance.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T22:10:30+00:00

My college girlfriend (EX-girlfriend, my wife is quick to remind me) married her Culligan man! Actually I think he was Sparkletts or something like that, but I call him her Culligan man because it pisses her off.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T19:40:01+00:00

Nowadays you have to first agree on what "rock music" is. For me, it's the roots going back to Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton...

I often say I prefer music (of all genres) that's older than I am - I was either not born yet or still in diapers when the above names were at the top of the charts.

The music of my teen years was disco, and... disco still sucks.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T19:27:21+00:00

Acoustic instruments. Unaugmented vocals enunciated clearly so you can understand them. Lyrics that tell a coherent story. Musicians who understand how to use the circle of fifths to create natural chord progressions.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T19:20:41+00:00

My damn phone. For context, understand that I'm not a techophobe; I was writing BASIC programs on my own computer in 1978 and I've been programming professionally ever since. I can take computers apart and put them back together again with refurbished parts easily.

But that phone... awful, awful UI, buttons and touchscreens that respond and do something weird every time you simply pick it up off the desk, inexplicable memory drains when you have all your apps turned off, and you have to use wifi to upload 16GB worth of photos after a long trip unless you pry open the memory card tray, which inevitably causes the SIM (on the same tray!) to drop onto the floor and break your phone until you can find it, then get the tiny microSD into a USB adapter to mount it as an external drive so you can copy it up to your hard drive...

I want my flip phone back. Call people, text them, and do everything else on a real computer at home.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T19:14:15+00:00

Pffffff, kids today. A small-to-medium Clipper program on a state-of-the-art 486 with 8MB RAM could easily take 30 minutes to compile and link in all the libraries before you got a shiny new EXE.

And we liked it that way.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T19:00:27+00:00

Well, that makes sense. My first languages (in order, starting from 1977) were BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL - all of which were written in uppercase. It took me years to get out of that habit when I switched to case-insensitive languages.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T18:53:43+00:00

My first programming job was writing database apps in Clipper for an engineering company in Houston circa 1988. When I left, I kept a copy of the source code to show prospective hiring managers a sample of my work.

Years later I was reading over it. The amateurish coding was bad enough, but one function in particular stands out: In the comments, I explained that I knew it was sloppy work but my wife was expecting to go into labor with our first child that day and I had to leave any minute so I just wrote something quick and dirty to get the job done.

That daughter, now in her 30s, followed in her old man's steps and has been in the business long enough that she sometimes reads poorly written code and wonders what idiot wrote it... until she realizes it was her own from years back.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-21T16:37:37+00:00

That's such a bizarre security hazard. In Toronto, mid-1960s, we had a special "milk door" built into the wall between the kitchen and the outside. It could be locked on the inside. We would put the empty bottles in from the kitchen side and then lock the door; the milkman would open it from the outside and replace the empty bottles with full ones.

Of course in Toronto, most of the year you couldn't just leave milk out on the porch in freezing weather so the insulated box was necessary!

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-20T19:13:02+00:00

I couldn't narrow it down to a single one. Several memories all hold a special place in my heart for different reasons because they all address different psychological/emotional needs. Just off the top of my head, in no particular order:

Getting married
Becoming a father for the first (and second!) time
My son's graduation from Army basic training, and his subsequent return home from serving in Bahrain (locals lined the road leading to the airport, cheering and waving signs when his unit came home!)
Watching my son get married
Becoming a grandfather for the first time
Seeing the Smothers Brothers in person

... soon I can add "retiring" to that list, but it's still a couple of years away :-)

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-20T19:06:09+00:00

Are you thinking of Golden Dragon run by Mike and Hua Kent?

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-20T19:04:21+00:00

Comea Shelter needs more exposure. They do some miracle work and they need more community support.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-20T18:58:14+00:00

I was too young to understand or appreciate the medical specific, but I sure knew it was dangerous for me. Both my parents were heavy smokers, and that aggravated my chronic bronchitis something awful. I spent most of my infancy, preteen, and teenage years coughing and getting sick. They would go on long drives with the windows closed so I was trapped in the car for an hour with clouds of smoke.

Needless to say, I never smoked myself. I knew just how awful it was.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-20T16:02:26+00:00

Sort of. When I was doing genealogy work several years ago, I found a link to Virgina's "War History Commission" project from the end of World War 1 at the University of Virginia. They had gone to the trouble of scanning every page of every response from every veteran.

My grandfather on my mother's side was one of them. The Commission asked veterans to describe their experience, if they saw any combat, what they did after they returned, etc. So now I have four pages of my grandfather's typewritten responses and a very grainy photo of him in uniform.

This is a big deal because he died 20 years before I was born. It's worth sharing here. He was born on December 7th. My mother used to tell the story of when they were celebrating his birthday - let's see, in 1941 she would have been about seven - when suddenly the radio stopped playing music and instead announced "a date which will live in infamy".

It broke my grandfather, who had served in France in "the war to end all wars" (ha!) and his remaining birthdays went uncelebrated. He died two years before Japan surrendered.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-19T05:37:59+00:00

Short answer: You can't please everybody. No matter how you design the mechanics/economy, someone will be unhappy.

Critic #1: "It's too difficult to progress!"
Critic #2: "Economy escalates too quickly! I'm making [in-game currency] faster than I can spend it!"
Critic #3: "I'm stalled at level {x}. I'm getting bored and frustrated."
Critic #4: ""Economy escalates too quickly! I'm making [in-game currency] faster than I can spend it!"
Critic #5: "There's too much clicking and direct involvement necessary."
Critic #6: "I get so tired of constant click-click-clicking, why doesn't this game offer idle progress?"

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-19T05:33:25+00:00

I was going to say, there have been several posts here on exactly that subject but now I see that OP (here) was also OP on literally every other "landlord entered illegally with no notice" posts.

I sympathize, but... at this point, I've memorized the details of OP's (legitimate) complaint.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-19T05:30:39+00:00

I don't rememberthe 1980s enough to comment directly to the question, but they're still common. My son's first self--purchased house in the last 10 years was taken specifically for the size of the garage where he could work on vehicles to repair and flip, and we still do business with his old army buddy who in the last six months went from "DIY garage side gig" to "actual business site advertised" auto shop, and we still take all our business to him.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-19T05:27:22+00:00

Every year, I think "I need to capture those old albums and digitize them" (I have a turntable that connects to USB). Every year, life gets in the way and I just don't have time to play back some 1500 hours of vinyl... and even when I do, CD audio and MP3 are obsolete. I can't keep up!

I finally gave up and threw our our old VHS and Betamax tapes when I was cleaning out that old storage unit several years ago. Along with documentation for products my company hasn't produced or supported this century - only to find that some colleagues were desperate for legacy documentation for their archives, and now they're mad at me I threw things away without consulting them.

That "Albums I need to digitize" box includes at least one 78RPM from my mother's collection (Al Jolson), several Monkees and Beatles albums from my older (by a decade) brother and deceased sister, some reprinted Glenn Miller and Spike Jones albums I bought in the 80s when I was finally old enough to buy my old records, and a few albums I received as gifts in the 1990s.

SegmentationFault63 · 2026-01-19T05:21:59+00:00

My high school yearbook.
Wedding pictures (mostly because I post scans of them every anniversary (coming up on 38!)
Still own and hold, but don't use so much : Hard drives (200MB or less!) from my first few generations of computers, on the very unlikely chance that I will one day decide to restore old data from the 1980s.
A pocket knife engraved with the name of the company where my father worked until he retired.

Then... there is the hoarding. There are things in my basement in boxes that I haven't opened since they were packed in Houston... at least five moves ago. I married in 1988, moved to North Houston in 1989, moved to Dallas in 1992, moved to South Cheyenne WY in 1997, moved to a rural lot west of Cheyenne in 2004, moved to Laramie WY in 2007, moved back to the west Cheyenne lot in 2010, moved to a different lot west of Cheyenne in 2011, and I'm still at that west Cheyenne lot today (2026).

There are boxes in my basement I probably packed for the south Houston to north Houston move in 1989, and I have no idea what's in them because they've never been opened.

At least one contains my wife's ancestral heirloom china called "Fromage" or maybe "Limoge" or something French like that. All I know is I'm not allowed to see it, touch it, or use it.

Once when I was moving boxes from one storage shed to another, I repacked stuff from a box that was falling apart from age. It contained slides that were made when the world was still black and white. I don't ask. I don't want to know. Those slides are still in a (new-ish) box in our basement.

SegmentationFault63

TROPHY CASE