Fire

Met BM, a young colleague of mine, on my way to work. He told me that there would be a change in the emergency take arrangement of our medical officer - a proposal made by one of the MOs who had already completed the training and was asked to review the system by certain extra-terrestrials.

My friend refrained from saying what he actually thought of the plan, but I was not at ease.

I told this story some years ago. Maybe it's time to read it again:

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Two men were caught up in a fire, one was blind and the other paraplegic. The former put the latter on his back, whose good vision guided both of them out of the trouble.

A small side-kick not told with this tale is: a third man on the scene, with good vision and no weak leg, could not escape. No, there's nothing strange. This man just saw the fire around the door and thought that it was too dangerous to go - alas, too painful for his feet to step on the red hot floor. This was of course not a problem for our paraplegic hero - the pain was not on his feet. We can imagine he put as much encouragement as he could to sooth the blind man's feet, just to make sure they could get out of the fire !

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Do you see the point here ? This paraplegic hero is called supervisor, and the blind trainee.

Of course a few supervisors had an intact backbone and no weak legs (a rare species, I agree); they could theoretically get out of the fire by themselves. Nonetheless it remains desirable to sit on the back of some blind one - not (only) to save the latter, but it is more difficult to guide your own legs without any consideration of the feeling.