Temp work still

The place I'm temping sells shoes.

I'm at a desk, plugging papers into a scanner, surrounded by piles of disordered paperwork into which the annotated complete Riverside Shakespeare would disappear like a pinch of salt in a cistern.

Sweet holy mother of mercy, I'm Al Bundy.

Somebody shoot me.

Please.

SHOOT ME.

This is not the America to which I pledged allegiance.

Overheard on the NewsHour:

David Brooks: "The sense among Republicans is that this [the President's assertion of the right to conduct wiretapping within the United States without warrants] is a winner."

Not in my country.

Not in my country.

Do you hear me?

DO YOU HEAR ME, YOU WORTHLESS SONS OF BITCHES?

You at the NSA, whoever you are who's reading this, do you hear me, you miserable bastard?

NOT IN MY COUNTRY, GOD DAMN YOU!

Where the blood meets the road

I'm not one of the people who has, out of the blue, gotten That Call. In that way, I've been very lucky. Once, my parents got That Call, and it was about me.

This isn't about that time.

This is about the time I saw the worst automobile wreck I've ever seen, on the worst stretch of highway in the United States, and all I or anyone else could do was try and keep the number of dead from rising and the number of wounded from dropping.

It is also about a case of criminal stupidity, over which the highest court in the Known Universe has rendered its final judgment.

There were two vehicles involved. One was a minivan, holding seven people, all of the same family. It was going south, just south of the border between New York and New Jersey. The other was a Porsche, which had been radically modified as a street racer. It was going northbound, carrying two people, brothers, one of whom may have owned the speed shop where the car had been modified.

At the time, I was with the local ambulance corps - it is significant to note that the town I rode for was not the town where the crash occured. This means that we didn't get the call first; the next town over did. We were doing whatever it was an on-duty ambulance crew did on a slow night, when we heard the distinctive tones of a Plectron alert over the radio scanner which piped into the various rooms of the ambulance corps building. A Plectron alert is a set pattern of musical tones, sent over a particular radio frequency, that will set off alert tones in pagers tuned to that frequency and programmed with the particular tones - this is so that many alert regions can share a single radio frequency for pagers.

We heard one set of alert codes, then a call to respond to an accident. Then another set of alert codes. Then another. Then we heard sirens off in the distance - lots of sirens. Then one more set of Plectron tones, which we recognized as calling out the fire department next door (you learn to recognize the codes even if they don't set off your pagers). Then one more pair of Plectron tones, the second tone interrupted by the harsh beeping of our pagers. Whatever had just happened, they were calling in the clans, and we'd just gotten the call.

A quick conversation over the Batphone (the squad had a hard-line telephone connection to the police dispatch desk), a quick order to grab turnout coats, and we were on the way. Out to the highway, looking for the signs of activity - it was night, so the first indicator would normally be a police cruiser diverting traffic, or securing the scene - this time, with the highway involved, the cops on traffic would be too far away, so we'd have to look for the firefighters and rescue crews and other ambulances.

Not this time.

The first clue of what had happened was a twisted lump of metal, about the size of an oil drum, in the middle of the road. About thirty or forty yards away, we saw the lights - cop cars, ambulances, ladder trucks, pumper engines, heavy rescue vehicles.

And the wrecks.

The minivan was still recognizable as such, but its front end was a twisted ruin. We quickly learned that the driver and front passenger were gone, written off; I think the crews in charge left their corpses in place because they needed the manpower to work on the people in the back, the five people they might - maybe - be able to save. Of the other car, little could be discerned; most of it was under a tarp, but I glimpsed a hubcap with the Porsche icon on it. It wasn't even recognizable as a car at that point, and nobody was wasting effort trying to pry out its occupants.

Someone - I don't know who - made the connection as we waited to be directed by the crew in charge: that twisted lump of metal we'd seen forty yards away had been an engine. Since the minivan had apparently been headed south, it had to have been the engine of the Porsche.

It had been ripped out of the car by the force of the impact, and had been flung forty yards - one hundred twenty feet, just shy of half a football field - before coming to a stop.

We were assigned a patient, one that was critical but had been stabilized somewhat by paramedics, and given a simple assignment: get the patient to a nearby parking lot, where the New Jersey State Police's NorthSTAR helicopter was waiting to evac the patient to a trauma center. I remember being thrilled at seeing the chopper lift off with the patient, and guilty at the same time for feeling the excitement, and worried as to whether we'd done any good, or whether we'd just slightly delayed our patient from becoming fatality number five. Or six.

The miracle was that anyone was still alive when the first response units even got there. Official reports later said that the van was going sixty miles an hour southbound, while the Porsche was doing eighty miles an hour northbound; a cop vouchsafed to me later that the car had been doing a hundred and twenty when it clipped another car it was passing, skidded sideways, and slammed headlong into the minivan.

120.

I think you can still find cars out there whose speedometers don't even GO that high.

The driver of the Porsche paid for his actions with his life. But he wasn't the only one. His brother died with him; the family in the minivan was shattered. I still to this day don't know how many of them survived the night. And there were dozens - maybe even a hundred - of the rescue team people who probably will never forget that night.

People like me.

I think of fast driving. And poor judgment.

The combined speed of impact was, if my sources are right, 180 miles an hour.

Next time they show a NASCAR race, imagine you're on the track, in a minivan, at a standstill, pointed into the traffic, with one of those cars coming right at you.

Now imagine the other guy's been drinking.

I don't have to imagine it.

Not any more.

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eta: If you've read through this, please leave a comment. Say something, anything, nothing. For some reason, just this once, it's important to me that I know people are reading this.