Whoever told that one first stole it from my volunteer fire department.The Annoyed Man wrote:To everyone's amazement, the little run-down fire engine, operated by these Norwegians, passed all the newer sleek engines parked outside the plant ...and drove straight into the middle of the inferno.
Outside the other firemen watched as the Norwegians jumped off and began to fight the fire with a performance and effort never seen before.
This is absolutely true, I was there, fall of 1964, in a rural volunteer fire department in upstate NY.
As the siren blew announcing a fire in the district, I headed for the firehouse. I was the second to arrive, and the first guy there, Willy, a perpetual drunk, had already climbed into the driver's seat of our pumper, so I got on the phone with the dispatcher and got the details of the fire, and then climbed into the officer's seat and gave him the go ahead to pull out on the ramp. Three or four other guys showed up and jumped on the back step and off we went to the fire.
The fire was in the feed lot of a farm in our district, who knows how it started, spontaneous combustion is common in hay, so maybe. There were no hydrants in that area, so we would be fighting the fire with the 500 gallons of water in our tank, and hoping our tanker got there quickly, as well as the tankers that were called from neighboring districts in mutual aid, and this meant we had to get water on the fire as fast as possible.
As we arrived, I could see that the fire had not yet gotten to the barn bit was threatening to do so, so I instructed Willy to pull up as close to the fire as possible and he tried. The problem was that the farmer had been trying to fight the fire with a garden hose, so when Willy, whose judgement was somewhat impaired, stepped on the brakes, he started to skid in the mud in front of the barn, straightened out, crashed through the fence into the feed lot, which, considering the potty habits of the cattle and the farmer's attempt, was even slicker than the mud out front, so we skidded right through the fire.
Willy jumped out and cranked the pump up, and two guys put out the fire around the truck while myself and one other fought the original fire.
Unlike the department in the joke, we did not get rewarded, quite the contrary, we had to get the pumper towed from where it was stuck, and we (the department) had to pay for the damage to the farmer's fences (we hit two.) And as the nominal officer in command, even the lowest level in the whole department, I caught it for not following correct procedure, etc.