RED HEADED STEPCHILD IN A BATHROOM STALL.

March 8, 2007

I wrote this one on a night where the job didn’t break me—but it sure as hell wore me down. There were no sirens blaring, no CPR in progress—just the steady, soul-numbing drip of being treated like a second-class citizen in your own city. This was one of those shifts where the real emergency wasn’t the calls—it was the claustrophobia, the thankless grind, and the people who treat you like a nuisance until the moment they need you. I was tired of being ignored, talked down to, or asked to move along like I was loitering instead of freezing my ass off trying to keep ready for the next run. So I wrote this as a sarcastic thank-you note to all the gold windbreakers and velvet track pants who only see us as background noise—until their world falls apart. Because yeah, maybe we’re the redheaded stepchildren of emergency response… but we still show up. Every. Damn. Time.