Tgeigs… I think you do not understand the simple fact that some people are on call 24×365, and generally restricted on how far away from work you can be. IdiotBasher may be one of those folks, even if he works for a hospital. In such a position, even taking a couple of days off for family emergencies, or for an illness can be a real hassle. And family vacations out of town are even more of a hassle, and therefore, unlikely to occur.

In addition, if I had to guess, I would say that you have probably lived in some big city all your life, and work in a much less critical line of work. I would not go so far as to say you work in a unimportant job (such as one which has you asking “Would you like fries with that?”, or some Wall Street broker or corpse-rat exec who has no clue of reality and legality, like Madoff), but I cannot rule it out either. But I do feel that you have probably not experienced small town living, where like nowhere else, it drives home the fact that in some cases, the second person who does a given job may be a 30-60 minute drive away, if you are lucky. And I think it is also safe to assume that you have not worked or volunteered as a doctor, nurse, EMT, fire fighter, or law enforcement officer in an area where you are always on call, and when the pager goes off or the phone rings, you often start out at a fast trot even before you know the details of what you are being called upon to do. Or, to know what it is like to be sitting down to dinner on a night where you have already had 2″ of ice, heard the long string of tones, and head out the door not knowing if you will be back before your family gets up the next morning. Or, to be awakened to those same tones at 3am, not knowing that six hours later, you will be giving condolences to the wife of a fellow responder who died that night. Or, to be sitting in a theatre watching a moving you have waited a year to see, and had your pager go off (in vibrate mode), and be headed out to drive your vehicle to where you need to go, while your wife is left to go home with friends after the movie is over. I don’t know what position IdiotBasher is in, but he is in a position I respect. I respect him because I take his word on the fact that he works in a position of sacrifice (which could include things like his health, marriage, and other things most folks take for granted), not as a cosmetic surgeon or some bean counting accountant, but in a position which really makes a difference. I respect him, because those responses above were my life in a small town I grew up in, where we lost a fellow responder, and later in small city (Fort Wayne, IN), where I was a volunteer fire fighter and hazmat specialist. (Even there, in a area of 500K people and 3 major hospitals, a simple traffic accident or house fire could put other bases into standby, if not actually shuffling equipment to other stations.) I was even part of a team which deployed more than 80 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, along with other specialists such as myself to Miami and New Orleans after Andrew. And most of us turn our phones/pagers onto vibrate without even thinking about it when we enter someplace like a theatre, unlike those who think they are important but really are not, who are the target of our ire. It is a habit I even followed when the pager meant not that some person stood to loose their life, but instead in a less important job, knew that perhaps, given the “911” message, that perhaps tens of thousands of people were unable to access the INTERNET to do what they felt was important in their lives at that moment in time. And heaven help us if that also meant that credit card POS machines were unable to work, or the DOD had one of their networks down.

So with that said, why don’t you guys either get a real clue, just make sure you have that organ donor sticker/endorsement on your license, so that you can make a contribution when you leave your life of being the sheep, cow or lemming you and others like you apparently are.