Control Room Manager
Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue

Alwyn F

00:00:05 My name’s Alwyn F and I’m the control room manager at the main control room for Lothian and Borders, Fire and Rescue, and we’re based at Tollcross in Edinburgh.

00:00:17 It can be stressful at times when you’re taking a call and someone’s, say, trapped by fire but fortunately those calls are not that common, although we train quite hard to deal them and it’s the training that gets you through it in the end, and we work as a close team. So you’re never…you never feel really isolated dealing with it on your own. So I suppose in that way, any stress is kind of dissipated or shared among the team.

00:00:49 When I was at school, I didn’t have a clear idea of what career I would want to do and I think that was the norm at that time. But I became interested in psychology and wanted to be a child psychologist, which was unusual because I didn’t know anything about children and I was only 18 at the time. So I went to university and studied psychology and English and graduated and then thought, ‘well, I don’t know what I want to do now’. And it was just by chance that my sister saw the job of a fire control operator advertised and she phoned me up to tell me about it and I applied. So, I joined…I got offered the job, took the job and I’m…thirty years later I’m now in charge, which was quite a journey.

00:01:43 I’ve brought in with me my long service and good conduct medal which anyone who knows me would laugh about me having a medal, or me being remotely proud of this medal, but I quite like it. Everyone gets it provided they’re here for, I think it’s 20 years. The good conduct bit, I don’t think they checked my past before they gave me it, but it is quite a nifty wee thing and it pins on, you have a little ribbon on your jacket and it just pins on and you can wear it on special occasions. How many people have got a medal? I think it’s great I’ve got a medal.

00:02:23 A highlight for me in the Fire Service has been meeting my current partner, who I probably wouldn’t have met if I hadn’t joined the Fire Service. But the other high point is, I suppose, if I hadn’t joined the Fire Service or had a well-paid job, I’m just back from Everest base camp and I don’t suppose I could have funded that so easily if I’d not had a well-paid job. High points in terms of my career. Well one would maybe just be last week after Bonfire Night where we…I put into place this new plan for how we would manage the control room and the calls and it went really well. It was something new, it was something different, a bit of change. And yet, you know, we really came up with the goods and I felt that a high point. Feeling I’d done…made a difference and done a good job.

00:03:15 I’ve never regretted joining the service and I’ve never looked back and thought, ‘I wonder what my life would have been like had I been a child psychologist’. But I have in a roundabout way come back to psychology and I’ve got a post grad diploma in counselling, so I’m a qualified counsellor, and I’m now back thinking about Freud and all these other issues that I was studying 30 years ago so. It’s a funny world.

00:03:45 Five years time, I’ll still be here. Ten years time, I’ll probably have retired and I’ll be doing voluntary counselling and still studying and listen to my Bob Dylan music and play my guitar and whatever. A hippie to the end in spite of my uniform. ENDS