I’ve never seen it in real life. I’ve seen it on TV a few times, though.
IIRC the 2nd Wick film, the word goes out that John is a target and like every third person in NYC is a assassin.
I’m told that as an infant I was once rushed to the hospital in a neighbor’s car with local police providing an escort. The story includes that a hubcap flew off of the neighbor’s car during the drive. (This antedates EMT in our city!)
On TV, it’s always ridiculously easy for an undercover cop to infiltrate a gang. All he (it’s usually a he) has to do is appear to commit a crime and he’s welcomed with open arms.
The most egregious example of this I’ve ever seen was in an episode of Dempsey and Makepeace: The cops stage a high-speed pursuit in front of the gang’s known headquarters with Dempsey making a bunch of tricky maneuvers to evade and escape them. Watching through the window, the Big Boss says “Blimey, we could use him!”
Quick cut to the next scene, and Dempsey is a member of the gang. No information on how the crooks tracked him down or even knew who he was.
Except for the tricky part where they ask him if he’s a cop. According to a very common TV and movie trope, an undercover cop cannot lie and say he’s not a cop. So he gets around it by pitching a hairy fit without actually denying he’s a cop.
BAD GUY: You’re not a cop, are you?
UNDERCOVER COP: Are you f’ing KIDDING me? Do I LOOK like a cop?? I should KICK YOUR ASS for asking that!
BAD GUY: OK, OK, settle down, it’s cool, we just have to ask.
If he can get past the delicate non-denial denial dance, he’s in!
I heard about it once, in the UK; the operator of a breakdown crane travelling to a major rail crash. Not exactly a run-of-the mill situation, though.
Some of us are gonna wake up in the middle of the night anyway. Might as well work that into the watch shift rotation.
“Okay, I’ll take first watch. Puma, you take dawn patrol. Overkill, you have an enlarged prostate, you take the 0200 shift.”
Happens too often, actually. Killed my brother and nearly killed an Ex.
Google Firestone 500 and later, the Bridgestone whatever that was.
I am very sorry about your loss. {{{ 
}}}
I had a full-on argument with a few friends about this- ages ago, but it still bugs me. We have an organisation called St John Ambulance in the UK- they do provide some patient transport services, but most of what they do is first aid, both training and providing it at events. The friend (more of an acquaintance really)'s Dad had suddenly developed chest pains while at a fair, so him and Mum rushed him to the St John Ambulance tent… and proceeded to argue with the first aiders that the correct thing to do was rush him to the hospital.
Now, I’ve done a training course with them. Although the organisation does include some proper medical professionals, at an event like that, they’re first aid volunteers, mainly geared up for stuff like sunstroke, minor injuries and basic triage. The ‘ambulance’ they have by the stall- while it may on other days be used to pick people up for appointments- is the van they transported the tent and maybe crew in. It’s not an emergency ambulance. The staff are not paramedics. They may have done a week-long course, maybe not even that. They probably have an idiot-resistant defib, and they’ve had some training for stabilising people in more serious situations, what they’re going to do when faced with possible heart problems is call a real ambulance.
Apparently, the idiot friend and his Mum insisted that this was not OK- they should instead load the guy possibly having a heart attack into the van and drive him - from the middle of a fair- to the hospital, rather than phone for an emergency ambulance. Because the name of the organisation has ‘ambulance’ in it, and they didn’t have time to wait…
They actually successfully forced these poor volunteers to do this, under threat of violence.
Anyway, about half my friends present when he was telling this story seemed to think the guy and his Mum had done the right thing, and cut through all this ‘nonsense red tape’ which was making them refuse, and probably saved his Dad’s life (he was fine, luckily). I could not convince them that they actually put him at greater risk, even though they clearly did, while threatening a bunch of innocent volunteers in the process.
Oh, and this is in the UK, where both the actual, paramedic-and-lifesaving-equipment-filled actual emergency ambulance and the hospital have no fees involved.
I used to be kinda irritated to see that they had real, public ambulance service ambulances at the horse racing here. I mean, gambling is hardly a public good is it? Why don’t they pay for a private ambulance service?
Then I learned that the reason we have an emergency ambulance service (in vic.aus) is because the horse racing people organised and created an emergency ambulance service for horse racing, and it worked so well that its coverage was extended to other events, and the community, and then the government took over the emergency service and split off the volunteer ambulance service to retain cover of other events where there aren’t as many medical emergencies.
So they aren’t using our ambulance service: we’re using theirs.
I never would have argued with them when they told me that an ambulance needs to be called - but I also never would have expected that an organization with ambulance in its name, which apparently does sometimes provide emergency medical services/transport would be at an event solely to provide first aid. When I’ve seen various volunteer ambulances at events, they are staffed with EMTs and paramedics and meant to treat/transport people who need more than what the first aid station can offer. I’m sure your friends were far from the only people who though it was a real ambulance.
Egg-zactly. When I was much younger I had a friend with a FIDE rating around 1250 who beat Bobby Fisher in his prime. “Of course,” he added, “Fisher was playing forty-nine other people at the time,” but not blindfolded. He was the only one who won.
He figured it was because the others were thinking OMG! It’s Bobby Fisher and played a conservative game. He figured as long as he was going to get his ass kicked he might as well go out in a blaze of glory and played aggressively to the point of recklessness.
Since Fisher was spending only seconds at his board, the one outlier would have cost too much time for him to shift mental gears.
Heavily subverted in Breaking Bad, in a classic scene
That may be the case in the USA, but we don’t really have volunteer emergency ambulances here- we have a national service. We’re closely packed in enough that there’s no need for volunteer ones to fill in the gaps (except the air ambulances, which are charity run, but they’re a bit of a special case).
St John Ambulance have been around, and had ambulance in the name, since the late 1870s -when they did run something resembling an ambulance service, but they basically dropped that once the NHS was formed. They’re the default first aid organisation in England; you encounter them running the first aid stands at almost every event, from hobby conventions with 100 attendees on up to the olympics, where they will be working with NHS staff and emergency ambulances (which will be parked somewhere for easy egress- not in the middle of a damn fair). They do tens of thousands of events a year- and if they aren’t actually running the stand because it’s a tiny event, they probably trained the people who are.
It’s not an obscure organisation here, is what I’m getting at- the name shouldn’t be a cause for confusion for someone who grew up here.
And when I say they do patient transport, almost all of this is not emergency- it’s stuff like picking people up for appointments who need a bit more attention than a taxi, or moving people between hospitals. They do, apparently, have some actual emergency ambulances- staffed by volunteer paramedics- but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, and you definitely wouldn’t expect to find them at the first aid tent at a little town fair. They might bring them to the Gloucester cheese rolling, where injuries are a virtual certainty…
And back on topic- first aiders don’t exist on TV or films, as a general rule- either it’s DIY or hospital.
I semi-committed this trope, and I thought I’d mention it just to show how it plays out in the real world.
When I was 10, and living in Moscow, and had just learned to play chess, I played one of my parents’ friends, who was a ranked player-- not a highly ranked player, more of a sort of weekend hobbyist-- a “minor leaguer,” but better than anyone you pulled off the street who didn’t play at all.
Understand, I had told him at the outset “Don’t just let me win, because I won’t learn anything. Really play.” He did.
I opened by moving the queen’s pawn, but after that, I was just playing crazily. I could see he looked confused, and I realize now it was because he wasn’t able to follow a stratagem.
So what he did do was clear the board as quickly as possible. He took my pieces left and right, and sacrificed a few of his own, mainly to bait me, so I left my king exposed. He let me keep my queen, probably so I’d have a false sense of security. Once I was down to my queen, a couple of pawns, and one other piece, and he had his queen, a bishop, and IIRC, both rooks, as well as several pawns, it was very easy to beat me no matter what moves I made. IIRC, my queen was pinned with a discovered check, so all I could do was use my one other piece to try to check his king, but my checks were irrelevant.
The game took all of about 25 minutes. And it would have been shorter, except he stopped sometimes to explain things to me.
So, yeah, I got creamed, but I did learn a lot. Before he started teaching me, I couldn’t even beat other 10-yr-olds. Afterwards, I could at least win against other kids. Which I can still do.
Nice thing about Law & Order. People ask the detectives all the time if they’re cops, and they flatly deny it. Then when they arrest the person, he whines that the detective lied to him, and he can’t do that.
Lenny makes some quip.
Cut to commercial.
We’ve been watching The Closer and its continuation Major Crimes. They lie to suspects ALL the time. So many times they’re having a chat with family members: “Look, we just need to know what happened to your father’s vintage 8-iron. I certainly don’t think he’ll press charges…” and finally someone admits “Yeah, I took Dad’s precious 8-iron, and hit him over the head with it on my way out.”
“Well, turns out that was a fatal blow. You’re under arrest for murder.”
“Wait, my father’s dead? When exactly were you going to get around to mentioning that extraneous detail?”
Heck, this was Columbo’s go-to move: we get to see a guy pull off what looks like the perfect crime, and sometimes our hero responds by saying, well, sir, here’s a key piece of evidence against you, at which point the murderer gives himself away, at which point Columbo patiently explains that, no, see, that other part, I made that up, is all; it’s just that I was lying — or that the ostensible eyewitness you just heard from never saw you, it’s just that I asked him to lie — or that this, right here, isn’t evidence from the scene of the crime; it’s just something I brought along.