I wanted to post and say "Thanks Reynolds" for this. For the quality of your writing. For the 'unexceptional compassion' you describe. Then I read other comments; by the firefighter, and the other ambulance/medical workers - and I want to say 'thank you' to you too. As a police officer, I clearly recognise so much of what you say. The switch in your 'mode' and you go from the car to the bus. The way you deal with cleaning out the ambulance - the extraordinary ordinariness of it. I don't see my jobs as 'ghosts' as some commenters do. That was a theme in that book about the New York ambulance driver, which I never managed to read all the way through (sorry, forgot the name of the book, too lazy to look it up :) because it didn't really 'speak to me' in the way that your writing does. My 'thing' is a fatalistic feeling that it will be me one day. Either being worked on in a car I've crashed driving home on nights; or maybe having a colleague in uniform come to my door to tell me it is 'bad news' about my wife and kids. Seeing it happen, and delivering such news to others; knowing the poignant, intimate, inconsequential details of such tragedies, does affect one in deep ways. Such events are, as your blog title reminds us, random. What continues to motivate me - and I am sure all of you - is to be there for those who suffer, and to treat them as I would wish to be treated if (when?) I were in their shoes.