Mensa Membership Becomes Even Less Likely

We finished our written fire training assessment today. Clearly their expectations of volunteer intelligence is low, because most of the test comprised of questions like this:

1. Complete the missing letter to identify a major risk factor in fire fighting:    F_re

2. If caught on foot in a bush fire, you should:
    (a) panic
    (b) run towards the hottest flames
    (c) follow the safety procedures you learned in this course

Even so, SOME of us (not me) were severely challenged by these tricky questions and needed Gordon to give us hints, or, if Gordon wasn't looking, cheat off my answer page. Afterwards we swapped papers to do the marking. Reece and I exchanged the universal Conspiracy Wink and if one of our answers was wrong we passed the paper back with a glib "Oh, Reece, is that an "i" or a "t"? Could you fix it up so I can read it clearly?" so that the correct answer could be covertly scribbled in before swapping back. As I pointed out, it wasn't really cheating, it was more like following Teamwork Protocol 7.217 (Section 683), "Maintaining A Supportive Team Environment".

At the end of it all Sam, bless him, got up and gave a very fine and heartfelt speech of thanks to everyone; we all forgave his driving us mad. He's on medication for something or other and clearly working hard to manage a disability. His endless good humour and kind heart won us over, which was lucky for him because otherwise we might have resorted to goal-oriented teamwork in the form of mob violence. The dogs came along today and Sam gave them lots of cake and chips which they are now farting out in waist-high stink clouds around the house.

Gary was still snoozing this afternoon after a tiring weekend of naked satanic alien reptile rituals at the Masons lodge in Mount Magnet, so I'm going over later with a stew. Back at work tomorrow and Tuesday, then hopefully the internet sleeping bags will have turned up and we can think about a short camping trip. With all the rain this year the bush is looking stupendous, really stunning - but it also means we will have some major bush fires up here next year, which is one of the reasons they're chucking us into as many bush fire courses as they can now. Hopefully by then we will have figured out how to read the fire maps, but I doubt it because the map test questions were things like "If travelling southbound on the northern edge of Eastings Sector 994786 in Grid Loc Point 89765421288 with a fire front flanking the western edge of Northing Sector 18746732523123 in winds of greater than SSW NE 78 degrees at 35 km/hr what sitrep grid location should you communicate to your OIC?"

We'll meet you there.