Good on ya

This morning I woke up probably the most tired I've been since getting over the jet lag. We tried to work the bus/train system and improve upon our transit time again. It didn't work, we ended up spending and hour and a half getting to work. Even if I have to do it myself, I'm taking the tram next time.

We spent the morning working on our survey and making a second draft of it. Becky made the first draft when we were in Worcester so it needed heavy editing. We finished that up shortly after lunch and got to work on the plan for our focus group. We spent pretty much the rest of the day finishing that and gathering materials in preparation of our focus group. Come 5:30 we grabbed the Tom Tom (or Steve Steve?) and hopped in the CFA mobile. Driving on the right side certainly was an interesting experience. It's not that much different surprisingly. I only went on the wrong side of the road once, and that was in the CFA parking lot pulling out. I didn't kill us both surprisingly enough. Even when we encountered several rotaries (roundabouts, we got laughed at when we called them rotaries) we made it through unscathed. We drove for an hour out to a little po-dunk town called Hastings. The center of town consisted of two streets with a couple store fronts and that's about it. It was right on the east coast (the one with waves) on the eastern peninsula of the bay that Melbourne sits in. We found the brigade really easily because it was on one of the two at the center of town. We got there an hour early so we decided to grab some dinner. Got some fish and chips at a small cafe down by the water. After dinner we went into the brigade and met the firefighters in person for the first time.

We found out that even though Hastings is so small, the brigade is considered an urban brigade. It seems Hastings was only small by our standards. They did have a steel mill and an industrial shipping port that the brigad have to look after as well. The volunteers were amazingly dedicated. They were a bunch of very normal looking people. They trained extensively within the brigade and out at training centers (several hours of work). The officers had to manage an amazing amount of work for being volunteers. All of these people had full time jobs and families. There were about 40 members in the brigade and we got to meet with approximately 15 of them. HQ had arranged the focus group and they knew we were coming. We explained our project and who we were and then we administered our survey. We timed them without their knowledge to see how long it would take them to complete the survey. It took them between 10 and 15 minutes to complete the survey, which is right around our target area. Then we had a discussion about our survey with them. There wasn't much that they said we needed to change or remove but when we got around to what we should add we had a lot of input. When it came to their training, the volunteers had a lot to say. There were many complaints and flaws that were revealed to us by the volunteers. Many issues were corroborated by other members with in the brigade. The spectrum of issues was widespread from issues with learning materials to the lack of practical assessments. The focus group by far was the best resource for gaining insight we've come across so far. We finished by 9:00pm and drove home.

We finally got home from work around 10:15pm on St. Patty's Day. Of course, no one was in the apartments. They had all gone out for the holiday. I tried to find out where they were but the club they were in was so loud that I couldn't hear what they were saying. Text messaging didn't work either because the street they thought they were on didn't exist. So I ended up spending a quiet St. Patty's day evening doing laundry and going to bed early.