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I'll be here until well past midnight, so I won't get any Champagne. Of well, at least I have a job.

Kind of like the old saying "I felt bad that I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet."

Holidays are like any other days in the medical field, only busier.

Cobra Medic wrote:Holidays are like any other days in the medical field, only busier.

I'd imagine that this one is especially busy.

First NYE off in 4 years, gonna throw a little shindig at the house with the wife and some friends. Don't worry though, I worked Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Does it count if you don't get paid? Our VFD stands a fire watch at our station every New Year's Eve. The last couple have been quiet, but three years ago we had 50+ fires in the county that night, mostly from errant fireworks.

Been rainin' lately tho, so hope tonight will be quiet.

I'm not working this evening, but I have to be at work at 6 AM on New Year's Day. Kinda kills the celebration, even without alcohol.

I get off at 7:30 after a 12 hr shift. If I'm still awake, the sparkling cider shall flow at midnight. Happy New Year to everyone. Hope all your resolutions are kept and met.

Well someone has to entertain the masses and once again its me. Nothing new though pretty typical if you're a theatre rat.

During the 5 or 6 years that I worked in the ER at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California, we had to pick between working 2 of the 4 shifts on Christmas Eve, Christmas day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's day. I volunteered to work the first New Year's Eve because I was really interested to see how busy it was going to be. Also, all ER personnel had to pull a double shift on New Year's Eve. My regular shift was the "PM" shift from 3:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m., so that meant that I came on duty that day at 3:00 p.m., and I went home the next morning at 7:30 a.m.

The population of Pasadena goes up by a minimum factor of 10 on New Year's Eve, sometimes more, because of the crowd that gathers and spends the night on the parade route waiting for the Rose Parade to start. We went from being the major ER for a city of 180,000 to being the major ER for a city of a couple of million in a matter of hours. Consequently, we treated a HUGE number of patients during that 24 hour period. Everything from exposure to GSW to MVA to OD to stabbings to rapes, even a severe electrocution suffered by a technician for one of the TV stations who was standing on one raised camera scaffold and reached over and touched the scaffold next to it which wasn't on the same ground. The shock knocked him off the scaffold and he fell about 15 feet. We lost a Sheriff's Deputy who was involved in a scuffle trying to arrest a drunken lout. They both fell through a store-front glass window, and he suffered a massive heart attack and we were unable to resuscitate him. The sheer volume of patients treated was hair-raising, and the variety of cases was remarkable.

Every year after that, I volunteered to work the PM and graveyard shifts on New Year's Eve because that was the safest place to be in all of Pasadena that night.

Katygunnut wrote:I'll be here until well past midnight, so I won't get any Champagne. Of well, at least I have a job.

Kind of like the old saying "I felt bad that I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet."

Well said! There are a whole bunch of people who wish they had a place to work this weekend.

I normally work till 9 PM, but got off at 7 last night. Went straight home and had a couple of beers and a cigar on the screen porch before settling down for the night.

I was fortunate to have this NYE off as I have for the past number of years. I did my share, however. I worked computer service in downtown Philadelphia and stood more than once in our dispatch center, looking toward city hall as midnight occurred. My first call after midnight one year was to one of the Philadelphia police stations - not some place that I particularly wanted to go on an evening like that.

Actually, NYE in Philadelphia is much better than working the graveyard shift there in the middle of the summer. At least on NYE, the cold keeps a lot of malcontents in doors.

I worked....not a fan