Partner

I like my partner. Truly I do. He's a nice guy, despite his insistence that we listen to R&B all fucking day! We get along fairly well, and while I don't see us getting to the stage that Epi did with her partner, it's not a bad deal.

However, my one beef with him is about driving. He generally does all the driving, because, quite honestly, I have a hard time seeing over the dashboard in the driver's seat (it goes up a bit, which obscures my view of the front of the truck, which makes me uncomfortable). He brakes a little hard for my liking, and takes corners a bit hard as well, but that may also be the difference between an ambulance and a van-bulance.

But where I really get annoyed with him is his following directions. Or rather, not following directions.

To be fair, he does know his way around DC and some parts of MD much better than I do. And we do have a GPS for most things. But he consistently misses the directions the GPS gives, and we end up turning around because we passed the nursing home or whatever (usually with the patient on board). Today, we had to find our way out of a neighborhood. I set the GPS to head to the local hospital, telling him to just use it to get out of the neighborhood so we could get back to the highway. He called me to the window because he got turned around twice, taking my directions for getting on the highway, but then listening to the GPS because it was telling him to turn around. No biggy, as I knew where we were and easily got us back on track.

Then we were getting close to the destination hospital, and I knew exactly where we were going, so I told him what exit to get off at and so on. We ended up on a different road, totally lost, because he saw the hospital off to the side and thought that's where he needed to go. Fifteen minutes later, we finally made it to where we needed to go.

I really wouldn't have minded so much, except that the patient was having some respiratory issues, and we really needed to get where we were supposed to be.

All that said, I really do like the guy. He just really needs to listen to my directions when I say I know where I'm going.

All else is on the GPS.

By the way, I have joined the darkside and moved to smugmug for my photo needs. Picasa was nice, but I'm at 99% of my alloted space, and smugmug is unlimited. It also has some nifty features I liked, and it's relatively inexpensive, especially with a promo code from a friend.

http://gnomish.smugmug.com