For sports fans, myself included, Spring is a wonderful time of year. Of course there’s March Madness and tons of college sports championships, and the NHL, and NBA playoff picture is shaping up.

Guest post by Eric Tomlinson. Eric is a Deputy Chief with the Kent Regional Fire Authority in Washington State

Much has been said about the brotherhood of the American Fire Service. Put firefighters from neighboring departments together at a conference, watering hole, or other neutral ground and we will buy each other beverages and compare our Maltese tattoos until the wee hours, celebrating our brotherhood of public service. For some reason though, when we broach the subject of change to our practices or operations with our mutual aid neighbors, we suddenly become very tribal and defensive. After all, most of us were hired by a Fire Chief who told us that

I grew up as a child of the 70s.  No, I was not wearing bell bottoms or syncing my dance moves to John Travolta (I did that when disco got cool again in the 90s).  By the time I had been born in 1971, humans had stepped onto another celestial body a few times over.  We had NASA fever in our household and Walter Cronkite narrated the saga; his voice hanging in the ether on hot summer nights.  As a kid, I gazed at the stars and the moon with a keen sense of wonder.  Madly leafing through NASA picture books, I dreamed of the future.

When I first entered the fire service in 1998, it was all about eating huge. After all, you never knew when you were going to eat again…. at least that was our station’s philosophy in the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Apple’s release of the iPad Pro unveiled a world of new possibilities to me both as a Fire Captain and as the founder of a tech company that provides Incident Management software.