Firehouse Blues

When Mortimer Manders collapsed in the street, his daughter, Muriel, was with him. Though now seventy-five, he’d continued to thrive, in spite of the irregular rhythm his heart was now keeping. But this was quite grave. He hit the hard sidewalk real sudden. When Muriel knelt beside him, and felt to locate where his pulse was, she couldn’t. Soon, passers-by stopped and gathered around, but no-one had medical knowledge. “It’s good, I suppose, If you loosen his clothes: I think that’s what they told us in college …” She looked wildly around, and thought that she’d found a willing and capable saviour. A red firehouse lay thirty metres away – (might as well have been Outer Moravia!) When Muriel pounded the firehouse door, a voice answered back through the panels, “You make think it inept, but we’ll only accept an approach through appropriate channels.” “But he pays your wages,” she argued with force: and, pointing to where he was lying, “You’ve got to come quick – he’s collapsed on the bricks – my father is probably dying!” “You don’t understand how these things are arranged,” said the voice, from the depths of the station: “You just call nine-one-one. If we try to respond, we are risking adverse litigation.” Running into the roadway, she flagged down a car, and the driver agreeably shocked her: with a white coat and bag and a hospital tag, he said, “Yes, you are right, I’m a doctor.” As the quack pulled away, he turned briefly to say, in a voice that was suitably gloomy, “I will not touch that man, for if I lend a hand and he happens to die, you can sue me.” The ambulance came, but things got more lame, as Mortimer started to weaken: though the ambulance crew looked resplendent in blue, the responders were all Costa Rican. “We’ve lived here some time and our English is fine, but we can’t touch our defibrillator. To avoid getting screwed, we must talk to him through an officially-sanctioned translator.” “But you sound good to me, and it’s peachy, you see, for my father speaks German and Spanish.” “But your ganso is cooked. No interpreter’s booked.” And the ambulance packed up and vanished. So the moral is clear. Clear of medics please steer. Your best course, if you’re feeling nervous, is lay on linguists each day in Magyar and Malay – and don’t call emergency services.