4EST G8, N.Y. — The town of Forest Gate, which legally changed its name to 4est G8 last week, is reducing its fire department by 10 percent based on projected time savings it will gain by mandating all written communication be done in text-message English.
Mayor Flaykeideis said in issuing the policy that he expects all departments will gain efficiencies by not having to muck around in dictionaries looking for proper word use and spelling. Just the time it takes to fully type or write a word compared with its shortened version will save hours every day, he said.
“Dropping ‘late’ to ‘l8' ‘you are’ to ‘ur’ and ‘before’ to ‘b4' for just fire and EMS reports spread out across a whole year will free up two full-time firefighters,” Mayor Flaykeideis said. “We owe it to our taxpayers to find creative ways to meet budget demands.”
The mayor said many of the older firefighters expressed concern over the plan. To address that, he plans to establish a committee of young firefighters to write a text-message dictionary that will be available in every firehouse.
The mayor offered this example of a converted memo:
2: All ffs @ St 16
b4 u plz leave the st @ the end of the ur ~ b sure all straps on apparatus mounted SCBA r fully extended that the bottles r filled w/ air and the regul8tors r clean
thank u
Fire Chief Fred U. Kantebreviadis said that by laying off all the firefighters with the least seniority, there’s no one left to build the text-message dictionary.