There's a report on Ceefax today (1st December) about a London ambulance which had a malfunction in its GPS equipment.
The crew were transferring a patient from King George Hospital in Ilford to Mascalls Park Hospital in Brentwood, Essex. If you look at a map (and if you're an ambulance driver, a map is a clever sort of picture that tells you where you are) you'll see that from Ilford to Brentwood is an almost straight run of perhaps 10 miles or so - about half an hour in normal traffic.
The ambulance crew only realised that their GPS was faulty when they started seeing signs for central Manchester, eight hours later. They'd travelled two hundred miles in the wrong direction.
We have been educated by television programmes like Casualty to see ambulance men as selfless, deeply committed life-savers. All right, they do have their problems - marital strife, drink, gambling, houses burning down, ordinary stuff like the rest of us - but at the end of the day they can be relied upon to make the right decision, to put their patients first, to act courageously and humanely and generally set an example to us all. They have these cool green uniforms, too, to protect them as they plunge into icy waters, scale tall buildings and dash bravely into fires, caves, fights etc.
And on the telly they actually seem quite intelligent. Not as intelligent as the doctors, of course, but they do tend to behave as though they've got the odd GCSE, and their knuckles don't generally scrape.
So how come the ambulance crew in this incident didn't wonder at all about their journey? Did it not occur to them to have a look at a map? Had they not the slightest inkling about the geographical relationship between the place they started at and the place they were supposed to arrive at? Once the journey extended itself beyond a couple of hours, were they not aware of just the tiniest trickle of doubt? Don't they have radios so they can ring up and ask?
Come on, be serious, who can possibly be that stupid? And should anyone so terminally dense be allowed out on the roads in an expensive vehicle, still less be paid for it?
By the way, the patient was said to be perfectly comfortable.
The GOS says: I'd drive an ambulance for nothing, if they'd let me have the siren and those flashing blue lights on. I'd be good at it. I really would - I've driven for forty years and never had an accident, I've never met a vehicle I couldn't drive, and I know the difference between Brentwood and Manchester. Manchester's much bigger, and it isn't near London. Go on, give us a job.
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