If I took the time I spend perusing Facebook and spent it writing blog posts instead, I could probably fill more server space than I have available. I spend way too much time on the â€˜net doing drive by posting on social media than I ever do posting here, and thatâ€™s a shame. I really should post here more often and I resolve to do just that, starting now.

And just what am I going to write about today you might ask?

Well, umâ€¦ EMS stuff I see on Facebookâ€¦ but today I have an important topic that needs to be addressed and the fact that it happens to be from the book of faces is just a coincidence.

There are a good number of people who claim to be EMS professionals who post on social media about themselves and our profession. Iâ€™m one of them, and a good number of the EMS people posting about EMS out there portray themselves and our profession in a positive light. However, if I wrote about the people who made us look like a bunch of blathering idiots, Iâ€™d probably never run out of topics. The EMS social media arena is sadly just chock full of people who misrepresent EMS to others in the field and to those who aren’t involved in our profession. It isn’t that theyâ€™re providing misinformation so much as theyâ€™re providing bad information which serves to tarnish our professionâ€™s image or worse. There are Facebook groups where the creme has risen to the top (Here, Here, and Here for example) and there are others that I wonâ€™t link to because I donâ€™t want to make that vein in my forehead throb any more than it already does.

As Kelly Grayson once said, there are a lot of people posting things out there that make us look like the “Low Information Voters of Healthcareâ€ and I really wish theyâ€™d knock it off.

My beef du jour happens to be with a sponsored ad for an EMS-related T-shirt that popped up in my feed this morning. Iâ€™m not mad at the ad itself per se, but while the T-shirt it was selling is among the dumber things I’ve seen, Iâ€™m madder at the mentality it represents. While a small handful of these T-shirts are somewhat clever and even worthy of a chuckle, most of them are just reprehensible and speak towards the worst possible clichÃ© representations of our profession. Taken lightly, these shirts and the thoughts they represent make us look like less-than professional people. Taken in context, they make us look like gibbering idiots.

Sure, weâ€™re ambulance drivers! Tee Hee! We drive fast because â€˜mergencies! Save Lives! Lights and Sirens and Diesel! Yay!

If you really want to wear an EMS related T-shirt that promotes our profession, could you at least wear one that doesn’t make us look like idiot ambulance drivers who couldn’t crack open a book if we wanted to due to our hands shaking from all of the adrenaline? Because that would be great.

Of course, this isn’t the worst of the shirts. There are plenty of others that are out there that are bad too. It’s an epidemic of dumb.

You’ve got your attempts at being risque:

Your humorous references to torture:

And then there’s this weird, windowless van kinda vibe:

Iâ€™d say that these shirts are great for people who have been considering retaking the EMT class two more times because they’ve tried it the last three times it was offered and they think they might start studying this time and change the outcome maybeâ€¦ but there are good people in circumstances like that and I donâ€™t want to insult them.

Seriouslyâ€¦ just say no. The web is getting full of crap like this from sites like TeeSpring put there by people who try very hard to make something loosely EMS-related so that they can part the worst whackers in our midst from some of their parentâ€™s cash. Donâ€™t buy them. Donâ€™t feed the trolls. Donâ€™t be that person.

Make yourself and our profession a little bit smarter by just saying “no.”

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Looks like I wasn’t the only one incensed by this kinda stuff today, Sean Eddy has some great ideas as well