Most of the time hoax calls are rather simple things. Often someone, mostly a child, will call the ambulance service from a phone box. We dutifully whizz around there with our blue lights and sirens in an effort to meet the government target save a life, only to find that there is no-one there.

In this latest call we were sent around to a house where it was said that a young woman had phoned for an ambulance themselves and, after giving a medical history of some detail, said that she was finding it so hard to breathe that she was unable to open the door.

We arrived to find the house in question looking un-lived in - there are subtle clues that even the densest ambulance man can point to as being a sign of no-one living there. In this case it was over a week load of junk mail in the house foyer.

We knocked on the door and there was no answer. Now, if there is someone laid out on the floor then I'm happy to attempt to kick in a door - however in this case, with signs of neglect and a slightly strange call, I decided that I'd get the police (something that we are supposed to do for all forced entries anyway).

The police arrived quickly and set about gaining access, the neighbours had come out to see what the fuss was about and they told us that the owner of the house had recently died. But we couldn't leave the scene without being sure.

The police managed to get the two front doors open as as soon as we entered it was obvious that the house was indeed empty.

On the way out, while passing the gate I felt a tug, heard a 'Pop!' and felt a tearing sensation - my (not very well made) uniform came apart at the seams. Thankfully it was only one of the leg pockets, but it was still annoying.

After a bit of a laugh with the police officers, and naturally my crewmate, we returned to the ambulance and informed Control that the call was a hoax. I then said that I would need to go to the hospital for 'essential repairs due to a wardrobe malfunction'.

You see, there is a bit of a tradition in the NHS - in that you aren't a proper NHS worker until your uniform, or a bit of kit that you use, has been mended using medical supplies.

Being slightly clumsy I passed that milestone in my career quite some time ago. There is a reason why on some of our ambulances bits of equipment are secured with medical tape...

So we headed back to the hospital where I asked the lovely nurses if I could have a loop of suturing material, and then sat outside in the ambulance sewing up my pocket. I used to suture people up, but it's a fair bit trickier to do the same to a pair of trousers that you are wearing without the aid of the forceps that you need to easily handle the needle.

So - a hoax call not only wasted ambulance time, but also the time of the police and ended up with me off the road while I fixed my kit. At least when the police broke into the house they did so without causing any damage so could secure the house again after we left.

Here is hoping that should the hoaxer ever need an ambulance we are all off dealing with slightly more deserving people.

The thing about twelve hour shifts, especially when you do a lot of them, is that they have a nasty habit of turning into thirteen hour shifts. Or like last night a thirteen and a half hour shift.

Sadly the job that pulled three crews into an unwanted hour and half of overtime was a genuine job. And a sad one at that.

Now, after sleep, I have an hour and a half to get ready and eat before heading back to do it all again.

And that is why this is a very short blogpost.

Blogging, and the answering of emails, may be a bit sporadic* for the next fortnight as I'm in the lovely part of the rota where I work 108 hours in these two weeks. Honestly if I wanted to work that many hours I would have trained to be a doctor.

It's lots of twelve hour shifts which, once I'm done sleeping eight hours a day, leaves me with two hours to eat and have free time/admin time.

Now, I have a favour to ask of you all.

Since I first heard of it I've wanted to go to South By Southwest Interactive - last year I even took annual leave in order to go but was let done by my NHS salary. This year I have a chance to go as one of the panellists.

The committee in charge of deciding who gets to go as a panellist initially hold a public vote, and this is what I need your help with.

If you could be so kind as to go here http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1291 to register and vote for this panel I would be very grateful.

As far as I can see this isn't against 'the rules' as it talks about the wider community of which us internet users are all part of. Your vote carries carries weight with the panel picker judges, so it's not just a case of whoever gets the most votes gets picked.

I think that it will be a good panel, covering topics like blogging anonymously and whistle-blowing.

*OK, MORE sporadic than usual.

Stairs. I hate them.

We were called to an older lady who'd fallen backwards downstairs, he'd then managed to crawl up her narrow and twisty staircase to bed. It was there she started to feel more pain than was expected and she asked her carer to call for an ambulance.

As an ambulance person one of the first things that you pay attention to once you realise that a patient is upstairs is the state of the staircase. Will it be easy to move a patient down? Will you be able to safely avoid any loose bits of carpet? Is there furniture (or, more commonly in my area, a pile of shoes) at the bottom that is a trip hazard? Then you meet the patient and start mentally totting up their weight and how likely they are to grab out at the bannisters, thus causing the whole lot of you to fall down the stairs and end up in a very litigious heap at the bottom.

Thankfully this patient wasn't heavy, but after examining her I couldn't rule out a broken neck. That and there was some real concern about a broken leg.

I wish she'd stayed put, crawling upstairs was perhaps the worst thing that she could have done.

Thankfully, despite the pain, our patient was in good spirits - so when I told her that we'd be taking full precautions in moving her she understood.

So, with a potentially broken neck, we would have to secure her to a stretcher, then find some way to manoeuvre her down the extremely narrow, steep and twisty stairs. At least the carpet was tacked down securely.

This would need a second crew, in this case many hands would indeed make light work. I made the call while my crewmate gave her some analgesia. Control were a little less impressed, we'd been extremely busy the whole shift and the chances of getting another ambulance any time soon were pretty slim.

Without a second crew I was considering calling out the fire brigade. They have a policy now of only assisting us when the patient has life-threatening injures (which is, needless to say, a policy that we should be copying). I'd have to sell it to them, and perhaps demand that we remove the patient via the first floor window on a cherry-picker.

Except that the window doesn't open and so would need to be smashed.

However a second crew did arrive and we proceeded to strap our poor patient to the stretcher, by now she was nearly pain-free and telling bad jokes, something I normally consider a good sign.

Fully strapped down in a way I described to her as 'as close to bondage that she'd ever likely get' we then started getting her down the stairs.

When you strap a patient down in such a manner it should be possible to stand the stretcher on it's head without the patient slipping. In this case we kept her feet down, but we would have to stand the stretcher vertically in order to get her downstairs. With a broken leg, if any pressure was put on her it would be incredibly painful.

Well either our pain relief, our strapping or our patient's pain tolerance held as we got her down the stairs without any yelping.

From there on out it was a simple matter to get her out to our ambulance and from there to hospital.

It would seem that my decision to strap the patient motionless was a good one, the Doctors were having serious suspicions of a broken neck once the initial x-ray films came back, and the leg was indeed broken.

I don't often strap patients down but in this case I was very glad that I didn't just sit them in my carry chair and have at it down the stairs. Sometimes going slow is in the patient's best interest.

No blogging for perhaps the next three or four days...

(a) Not enough of you have joined ORG, so I'm having a sulk.

and more importantly...

(b) Two days of Great British Beer Festival with a party on each of those nights. Then spending Saturday no doubt laying in bed moaning loudly. If you are around do come over and say hello - I tend towards not biting, even after a bit of drinking.

Anything important, just email me at the usual address.

A couple of months ago we had a quiet start to the day - three crews all sitting on station waiting for someone to be sick. It was lovely. We sat around, had a cup of tea and chatted. We talked about some of the jobs we'd been on and about a new violent regular patient. We did some informal teaching and generally renewed the sense of teamwork between those crews.

It was unusual, but very, very valuable. It's why I can remember it four or five months later.

But that's not going to happen anymore because, from yesterday, we have the brilliant new idea of 'Active Area Cover'.

Active Area Cover means that we will no longer spend more than thirty minutes on station. Between the hours of 8am and 10pm if we are not out on a job we will be expected to go to an area to either sit in the cab of the ambulance waiting for a call, or roam around in a half mile radius.

Outside those hours we may be sent to different stations, or sent to sit outside a hospital.

We are to remain at these locations for up to an hour before being allowed to return to station. Or if we keep getting sent jobs then we are to be given three chances to go to the cover point before being allowed back to station.

The idea behind this is that it will reduce our activation time by a whole 60 seconds, while also putting us closer to the next job that is about to come in.

But how, I hear you ask, do our management know where the next call is coming from? Well, we have a brand new piece of software that can see into the future. Connected to a crystal ball it uses past trends to tell us where the next person to fall off a ladder will be. I wonder if anyone will be able to connect it up to the lottery numbers...

Now, while there is evidence that the psychic computer can be of some use in rural settings, according to my crewmate who studied the system for her degree, in urban settings it's effectiveness is unproved.

Essentially the population density is such that a computer system like this is almost certainly worthless.

I'm 6'1" tall and lanky with it, I get a bad back from sitting in a cab as much as I do anyway - this new policy can only increase the amount of time that I spend cramped up there. The rare occasions when we get back to station is a chance to use a clean toilet that hasn't been used by infectious patients in the A&E department and maybe even get a cup of tea.

I'm dreading it, or I would if we weren't bouncing from job to job anyway.

And the purpose behind this? Well, obviously it's to meet targets. Getting to a patient one minute quicker won't matter in 99% of the jobs that we do. The psychic computer will be useless, as useless as the automated dispatch we have been using for the last few months.

And before you ask, yes, the unions did agree to this, apparently it was going to be even harsher than this, I can hardly see how.

Once more it will pit those in Control on the phones against road staff, it's not Control's fault they they will be ringing us up on station telling us to go to our standby points with 'the same urgency as an emergency call but without lights and sirens', but they will get the brunt of the bad feeling - not the bright sparks who thought this idea up.

Staff morale will decrease and sickness will increase. Floggings will continue until morale improves.

Patient care won't change, it may even get worse - especially if the computer is wrong. I suspect that our targets will continue to plummet slide.

What is needed is either less patients or more ambulances, and these ways of 'working more efficiently' are all trying to disguise this truth.

You may be aware that I do enjoy a good comic.

I was a big fan of Phonogram : Rue Britannia and there will soon be another comic set in the same world. I'm greatly looking forward to it.

This is from Keiron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie.

It's dark and it's raining, I've managed to evade my pursuers for long enough to duck into an alley just so I can catch my breath. The party I'd come from seemed a lifetime ago.

It's my own fault that they are after me, one of the microphones caught me at it. I can remember the days when the CCTV cameras only had loudspeakers, the controllers could tell you to pick up the litter that you'd just thrown on the floor. It was hailed as a great breakthrough, a way to stop the rot of anti-social behaviour. We'd asked for it ourselves, more and more cameras to make us feel safer.

But how could you tell the threatening behaviour from visual cues alone? How could you tell if someone was making a racist remark, or planning to bomb a tube station? So they came up with the idea that if you put boom microphones on the cameras you could listen in on what people were talking about. Again, this was welcomed by the public, "It'll stop terrorism", they said, "It'll make it harder to live as an illegal immigrant".

So the people agreed.

Obviously we weren't arresting terrorists, and what police force has the resources to check anyone not speaking English as a possible illegal immigrant, so the system was overly expensive and hardly used for the purposes that it had been built for. The government wanted their money back.

I suppose that it was only a matter of time before one of the largest lobbying groups went to the government with an idea to help fund the system. It was pretty simple really, unlike the attempts to get voice or facial recognition working this was a proven technology. It was a technology lots of us had been using back in the day.

Music recognition.

Music recognition is a way in which we found out what music was playing in the bar, on the radio or over the end credits of a movie. You'd hold your phone up to the loudspeaker and after some clever 'musical DNA jiggery-pokery' it'd return with the name of the song.

It's a really clever idea especially if, like me, you'd always be tuning into the radio halfway through a song.

So the record companies lobbied to have the technology wired up to the cctv microphones - they would then be able to collect fees for the 'unauthorised broadcast or performance of copyrighted music'.

So if you hummed a copyrighted tune in front of one of these cameras it would recognise this music and flag you up on a map for the Copyright Police to come and get you. The Copyright Police were employed by the big record companies to make sure that you weren't some sort of commie-pinko copyright infringer. They were allowed to hire these 'copycops' after they were given the power to stop and search your iPod for any tracks you couldn't account for. They loved ACTA, it opened the door for all sorts of nastyness and did away with the need for a judge, or a jury of your peers.

As I say, it was my own fault. I'd been to a party and had forgotten to have my memory of the songs wiped. This meant that I had an illegal copy of the song roaming around my head, and when I'd inadvertently (and perhaps drunkenly) sung a snatch of it on the walk home I'd just confirmed myself as a pirate. I was stealing money from the grandchildren of the original artists.

As I say, the facial recognition systems are still buggy as hell, so if I managed to make it home I might be safe, I'd heard some horror stories of the Copycops wiping songs from your mind and taking half your childhood memories with it by 'accident'.

I knew I should never have joined in singing 'Happy Birthday' to my girlfriend at the party.

OK, so the snatch of fiction above is a bit far-fetched, but not by that much. Check out the links in the story if you don't believe me, if the political or economic will is there much of this story could become reality.

So who do we have fighting against our digital rights being curtailed? Who is it that wants you to not be seen as a thief and a criminal? Let's face it, if you have ever put one of your CDs on your MP3 player, or ripped one of your own DVDs to your laptop, then you have broken the law. If you have downloaded an illegal MP3 then you've broken the law, and it is estimated that 80% of internet users have done this.

This isn't getting into the sillier things that the record companies are trying to do.

Who is fighting for the ability to audit elections and put a stop on expensive and easily fiddled e-voting?

In 2005 I was in the room to give my pledge of £5 a month to form what would become ORG. It's £5 that I gladly spend to know that my voice is being heard.

But it's time for ORG to grow. Those of you who visit my site as opposed to those who read my RSS feed may have noticed the ORG 'Thermometer of DOOM' that has appeared on the side of this blog. We are looking to increase those £5 a month to 1,500 subscribers.

As someone who is involved in the group I'd like to ask people to put their hands into their pockets and pledge £5 a month in an effort to make sure that a future like the one described above doesn't come into effect.

If you don't believe me, take a look at their website, all their campaigns are there, what they are fighting for and the already impressive success stories that they have already caused to happen.

Here is a bribe, and one that has been taken up by other bloggers - if I can get 10 people to sign up to ORG, I will promise to write a blogpost everyday for the next 30 days.

Please. Go here and join up. for the cost of a pint and a half a month you can have dedicated and passionate people fighting on your behalf against the groups who would have you sued into bankruptcy for taping something off the telly.

Click To Play

Disclaimer - If three people sign up because of me I'll get a T-Shirt, if I get the most new signers by November 19th I win an eeePC. That isn't why I'm doing this, it's because I strongly believe in the cause. (Of course, if you want to mention that you came to the site via me I wouldn't be upset...)

These last four days at work have been tough, it's been extremely busy and it seems, more than ever, that there just aren't enough ambulances to go around. I spoke to a friend of mine who is on the FRU and they told me that for the entire nightshift they were turning up at a job and then waiting two hours for an ambulance to arrive.

Remember - FRUs are the vehicles that are supposed to go to the most serious hospital cases...

My personal experience wasn't much dissimilar. My shift would start at 7am. Ten seconds after the shift started the activation phone would ring and all the ambulances on the station would be sent out on jobs. I was told that on one particular morning Control was queuing twenty-five calls at 7am.

One particular job made me fume, it made me angry that the patients had waited so long and yet nothing will be said about it.

The job was an hour and a half old, two pedestrians had been hit by a car. Yes - they had been run over.

Thankfully there was a policeman there and he managed to wrap one of them in a blanket. One patient wasn't too seriously hurt although he may have broken his hand, but the one on the floor had a knee that had swollen up like a watermelon.

The first thing that I did on arriving was to apologise, the policeman who was there understood how busy we were and told me that they would have taken the patient in themselves*, but that given the state of his knee they didn't want to move him.

Neither of the patients complained. Neither of the patients will complain - they come from a section of our community who seldom complain about anything, they just get on and deal with it.

I later returned to the hospital and saw the x-ray of the man's leg. He'd rather neatly broken his leg just above the knee (a supracondylar fracture), he was still refusing painkillers.

So how long had he laid on the floor in the early hours of the morning with a serious fracture of the leg (and possibly other more life-threatening injuries)? An hour and a half. In the middle of London.

It won't be on the news because the patients won't complain and yet I would guess that this wasn't the only instance of this happening during my four days of work.

It's not working, this ambulance service, we either need more fully trained and crewed ambulances, or less calls - I can't see us getting less calls and the way we may be getting extra ambulances isn't too good either if the rumours are to be believed.

In our area we are supposedly at 70% staffing, and this is based on levels determined some years ago.

There are many times when I feel proud to work for the LAS, the way we deal with heart attacks, the way we deal with many disparate communities and the way that the crews on the road are able to deal with any crisis. But this episode made me feel shame.

How we fail may be a bit of a thread in the near future, I'll try to keep it positive by suggesting ways in which we can change for the better - not that anyone will listen.

*After reaching the hospital one of the nurses told me that the police had been transporting asthma attack patients into hospital - this isn't the first time that the police in our area have transported a patient. I've seen them transporting RTA victims in the past.