Well, $255 was a lot to spend for a kid making $4.35 an hour. Most of my paychecks didn’t even have a comma. I had saved up for months and there I was at the airline counter buying a roundtrip ticket to Seattle.
The Seattle Fire Department was having an entrance exam, and I wanted to get a job in the Pacific Northwest. I love the rain, the fog, the green. Everything about Seattle was calling my name.
At 21 years old — technically broke, and for all purposes treading water at my current job — I boarded the plane. The exam was being held over a two-day period, and the Motel 6 near the airport would have to do. Day 1 was the written test, Day 2 was physical agility.
I checked in, grabbed a bus schedule and timed my travel to the testing site. I spent the rest of the evening imagining how amazing it would be to live there.
At 6 a.m., I was out the door to the University for the written exam. This testing time was only for folks from out of town, and the 400-person theater was packed. Most of the exam was standard tool recognition, mechanical aptitude, some vocabulary, and a series of map memorization exercises that require you to route an engine through a fictional town based on memory.
The next morning, I decided to treat myself to a proper breakfast before the physical agility test. Sitting at the Denny’s nearby the training tower, I read through the test preparation packet and reviewed what I was going to be asked to do. When finished, I walked over to the site.
The test began with a series of basic weight lifting exercises that had to be completed exactly as instructed. First a bicep curl with hips, shoulders and head against a wall. This was followed by a seated bench press with similar requirement to follow their instructions exactly. The first candidate stepped up and was clearly in great shape, lifting the bar like a toothpick. It was then that it occurred to me that actually lifting some weights prior to this test would have been a really good idea.
After clearing the minimum one repetition to pass, ignoring the 10 reps for extra credit, I was off to the tower.
Airpack on and hose bundle on my back, I had to climb the seven floors, drag a dummy, then complete a number of tasks. This culminated with pulling a roll of hose up to the seventh floor by rope, using a hand-over-hand method.
The exam was brutal for my out-of-shape frame, but the dozens of people cheering me on and shouting encouragement kept me going. I reached the final portion of the exam and the captain holding the stop watch called out to me, “Twenty-five seconds left! You can do it!” I began pulling as hard and as fast as I could as I counted down from 25.
At 15, 14, 13 my arms were boiled noodles, my legs began to give out, and I’m sure there are still tales told of the contortions on my face.
5, 4, 3. Where is this hose?!
2, 1 … 0. Still, I pulled and still they cheered. When the hose finally reached the top and I pulled it over, I went down on one knee to catch my breath. On the way up the tower, I had noticed small trash cans and rolls of plastic garbage bags. On the walk down the tower, I was glad they were there as my breakfast choice was confirmed as a bad idea.
I had failed.
The written confirmation arrived a few weeks later, encouraging me to try again in a few years.
When I did decide to get serious about testing, I thought back to that morning in Seattle and decided the next time would be different. I modified some of the gym equipment to simulate the skills required during the exam, and I started running again. Quiet days at the firehouse saw me away from the playstation and out in the yard pulling 5-inch hose across one side of the parking lot, then dragging it back into a pile.
It would have been very easy to walk away from that exam and blame my failure on the weather, breakfast or their unique test, but instead I used it as a lesson. That lesson paid off the very next test I took. That time I reached the final dummy drag with two minutes and 30 seconds to spare. I knew that not only did I have plenty of energy left to complete the task, but I knew I could do it in 45 seconds. Because, I wasn’t going to fail again.
