New Rural Paramedic
This is a story from about 9-10 years ago now, when I first took a job (okay, was posted) out to a very remote part of rural Australia as a newly qualified paramedic…
Okay, so I leave rainy Sydney and have a lovely drive out in the country (about 9 hours into the area of my new employment). That is, a lovely drive, until my car overheats and I find myself stranded about 100 odd Kms outside of my new town… with the outside temperature being 46 degrees that day… I try and find a tree for shade. Non- whatsoever to be seen. I fortunately have water. The car quickly becomes too hot to sit inside… and everywhere outside is riddled with those red bull ants that attack you the second you’re within a mile of them. So I find myself in the scorching sun, middle of nowhere, walking up and down the deserted road trying not to stand still long enough to be bitten by these bloody painful ants…
But good news… I call NRMA (our road side assistance), and they tell me that the NRMA man for the entire area happens to be driving up the road that I’m on anyway and will stop by in about 15 minutes!! Fantastic… he stops sorts out my problem (a broken hose, which he replaces)… and I’m back on the road again… unfortunately, the same pipe falls off and literally 3 minutes later I’m on the side of the road again calling the NRMA… unfortunately, now the NRMA man’s phone is out of reception range and I am told that they will keep trying him… unfortunately, about an hour later they call and still haven’t reached him and I get a phone call from someone in Hay (about 3-4 hours away) who end’s up explaining to me what to do over the phone… which fails miserably… and I’m told he can get there within about 4 hours…or I can try slowly driving the car and then stopping until I get to the service station approximately 5kms up the road (ended up being 40kms). So over a three hour period I got my car to my new paramedic rural posting … where the town mechanic assures me he will work out the problem and fix it over the next week or two… maybe a month… (I mean, in a town with less than 300 people, how busy can a mechanic be?)
On a nicer side, the two people who passed my broken down car during my 3 hour’s of waiting in the middle of nowhere both stopped, offered me assistance…and after being told that I was waiting for NRMA, both of them insisted on leaving me a bottle of water so that I would be safe… isn’t that nice… also the people I’m renting my house from offered to come tow me back when to the town when I first called to say that I wouldn’t be meeting them to pick up the keys because my car broke down… they also left half a case of beer in the fridge with a note “To cool you down after the drive…”