Richmond or "Bait the Hook"

Richmond is a medium sized city that really gets a bad wrap. I think even more so than Oakland. I mean, in Oakland it is widely known that the "hills" are reserved for the upper class and upper middle class community while places like East Oakland and downtown Oakland are not the best paces to be walking around at night. Sad really. I mean there is always danger in every city it's just the media that magnifies the bad and usually not the good. Having said that Richmond has always had problem recruiting both Police and Fire personnel; this according to people in line, the very few people.

I half expected the Richmond application process to be somewhat like Oakland's, crazy long lines, overnighters and lots of people. But no. This was now the second least painful process. I got there a little late and had no application in hand. In fact there was nothing on the website that indicated the need for a written application. But I wanted to be prepared and ended up at Kinko's spending waay too much money on copies and time to use the Internet finding and filling an application. Well no application needed. I quite literally walked in, showed my ID, EMT cert, SS Card and BAM, I got a written test date immediately. So. Here we go.