The Bobby Bones Show - Episode #6: Tiny Yet Fierce

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

How many jobs are there where you need to know and trust the person next to you, because there might be a time where your fate is in their hands and vice-versa? Meet Anna Nadler - a 27 year old civic engineer, and firefighter, from Massachusetts. Small in stature and sweet as can be, Anna got addicted to smoke-eating a few years back and is now one of the best firefighters on the force. By day Anna runs construction and engineering crews building bridges and roads. At night she is on call as a firefighter. Anna is a shining example of a young woman getting involved in a job that gives back to her community. She is also an example of a woman excelling in what is a traditionally macho work environment. She has many stories of life-threatening situations on the job, showing heroism in the face of them that only made her want to do it more. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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No, just showing you where the real Hollywood stars are. Like Tiana's Bayou Adventure. Oh, there's jazz, right? And a drop. You'll see. Grab a Mickey Brussels on the way. Girl, you'll read in my mind. We're almost.

There. Disney California Adventure Park and Disneyland Park. We came to play. Both part tickets and reservations requires subject to restrictions change and cancellation without notice. Visit Disneyland.com for details. On the job is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Express Employment Professionals is a leading staffing provider that employs nearly 600,000 people annually across more than 800 franchise locations in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa. Our long-term goal is at the heart of our company's mission. To help as many people as possible, find good jobs by helping as many clients as possible, find good people. It takes more than just online searches to land a job. It takes real people who will identify your talents, a person invested in your success.

Express Employment Professionals understands what it takes to land a new position at a top employer or start a new career in today's job market. Express knows jobs. Get to know Express. Go to expressprose.com. Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're bringing you stories about people finding their professional stride by virtue of who they know, whether it's breathing new life into an age-old profession, taking the reins in a family business, forging your own path with a new idea, or landing the perfect job doing something you'd never before even considered. Today for On the Job, producer Otis Gray travels to Southampton, Massachusetts to interview Anna Nadler. Anna is a rambunctious young woman working not one but two jobs that by looking at her

you might not see her doing. She's five foot two, she's bubbly, and on most days is vastly outnumbered by male co-workers. While her job choices might seem at first glance non-traditional, she's in no way out of place in either. Here's Otis. Anna Nadler is 27. She's a civil engineer living in Southampton, Mass, and right now it's the middle of the night. She's going to have to wake up at 6 a.m. She and her crew have a big job replacing a bridge a couple towns over. But somewhere, around 2.30 a.m., she hears this come out of a radio that she has charging on her kitchen table. That's the fire department, and the code is for a structure fire, a big one.

So Anil leaps out of bed, and she responds. 29, responding. Seconds later, she is dressed and running to the car. Just got toned out for a structure fire. We're going mutual aid to East Hampton. Running out the door now. Right now it's February. There's snow on the ground.

There's lots of ice. It's about 15 degrees outside. It's going to be a cold one. I see in my car now. It's actually 3 a.m. You get these calls and your heart is racing because you're so amped up. Structure fires do not come around every day.

For the last two years, Anna has been an on-call firefighter here in Southampton. She's not your typical firefighter, or a typical person you'd see on a roadside construction crew. She's short, she's about 5'2, she actually describes herself as fun-sized. Regardless, she says she's usually the first at the station when there's a call. The other guys, they need to get up, go to the bathroom.

It sounds terrible to say, but I'm super excited because I love fighting fires. Like, it's just, I'm so passionate about it, but it's terrible at the same time because this means someone's property is on fire. Garage, barn, you don't know, but that's on fire. So, well, we're about to see what it actually is, but. All right, I am here. Stay tuned for an update. So today, we follow Anna Nadler as she juggles her life as an engineer, her love for running into burning buildings, and being an unexpected person to do both. An update for you now on a house fire in East Hampton that we told you about on 20th news this morning.

According to East Hampton Fire Chief David Motter, everyone made it out safely. Three firefighters, though, had minor injuries and one had to be taken to the hospital with neck and shoulder injuries after part of the home's ceiling collapsed on top of it. What you're hearing now is from a local news report on the fire that Anna just responded to. And before you get worried, she did not get hurt. Everyone was okay. One of the other firefighters she knew at the scene was transported to the hospital, but was totally okay. shortly after. It was an old home that caught fire quick. Anna was inside fighting the fire, and then on the roof ripping off siding so that the fire didn't spread. I asked her when she was a

kid if she ever imagined her future self on top of a smoldering building at three in the morning. Oh, God, no. I don't know how I got here. I do and I don't. When I was a little girl, there were two things I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to paint houses with polka dots. I painted houses in the summers, and I loved it. Like, I think painting's really relaxing. I never I forgot to do the polka dots, but you know, I got past that, but definitely not what I wanted to do 40 hours a week, and I wanted to be a firefighter. She says it started when she was really young. She had a deep infatuation with fire trucks. I remember whenever, you can ask my mother about this or my siblings, whenever I heard sirens,

I sprinted to the window to watch and prayed that they would go by on our street. I loved fire trucks, and I didn't really necessarily see me putting on gear and going to a call, but just something I was always really curious about. As far as gear goes, Anna is proud to say that she has the smallest boots ever worn at the station. Anna's always smiling. She's got pale blue eyes, dark hair, and she's always been little. And growing up, that was a big part of her identity, especially at the Catholic school she went to in southern Vermont. I remember being picked on because I was little a lot.

Like girls were pissed that I could fit into like smaller size clothes. And I'm like, listen, I fit in kid's size. Like, I'm not even in the teen section yet, so you really shouldn't be picking on me. She also very plainly describes her younger self as a nerd. I had glasses and then I had braces and I definitely had some ugly bangs for a while. So definitely a nerd. I was very, very quiet. So I just was kind of hiding in the corner, didn't know what to do.

I was a hot ticket. And now I wear a hard hat. Just like she couldn't really imagine being an actual firefighter when she was young, she really never saw herself in a hard hat with command over construction sites, repairing roads and demolishing bridges. I honestly kind of accidentally made my way into engineering because Mr. Hodgkins from high school, shout out to him. He convinced me to take AP physics, and I'm like,

I know a little bit about physics, but like, I don't know. I took it and I like will wave my nerd flag hardcore right now. I was fascinated that I could throw a ball in the air and figure out when it was going to come down and where. Like that was so cool to me. When she got to college at the University of Vermont, an advisor saw her love for physics. and convinced her to go into engineering.

She was really drawn to civil engineering, especially the transportation aspect. So she did a rotating fellowship down here in Southampton to try all the different jobs at the field entails. You know, I was stuck behind a desk a lot of it, and then finally construction came along, and I was on Interstate 91, and I was, like, just in love. It was amazing.

I loved going into work. I loved seeing the job. I loved watching it progress. So when that rotation finished, She chose to go into the construction side of engineering full-time, and she moved here to Southampton. The day I was with her, she brought me over to her current project. She's wearing a hard hat, a white one, which is generally the color that engineers wear. She's got a neon vest on, and we're walking on an aging bridge that they're preparing to demolish so that they can put in a new one.

I knew everything. Out with the old and with the new. It was the first time that I really thought about everything that goes into a job like that. Diverting traffic alone for months on end seems like a daunting task and it's just one of many. Utility relocation, we gotta do the gas main, move that. We're gonna start demoing the bridge itself. Then we'll rebuild that portion of the bridge, flip-plop, demo the other half, rebuild that half, so then the bridge itself will be complete. There were a lot of trees that needed to be cleared.

They're gonna have to redo all the roads around the bridges completely to reach quality standards. They have to put totally new traffic signals in both intersections. The list goes on and on. A little bit of everything on this job. Nice. Mm-hmm. I think a lot of people get frustrated seeing those big orange signs that say

construction zone ahead. It means delays in where you need to go. Or you just go by not thinking much at all about what they're doing there. Anna is fine with that. She's actually got a pretty romantic view on what she does. It's infectious.

I kind of say a construction job's kind of like a baby. Not that I have kids, but I would imagine. And it's like you just see it and you see it from the beginning before it's even a thing. You see it when it's just paper. And you want to grow up to be a big, beautiful job. So, you know, then when it's done, you're like, you drive by it. No one else thinks about it.

You know, if it saves five minutes off their trip a day, like, that's awesome. And you can look at it and be like, yeah, it was a part of that. That's my baby. That's my baby. While we're talking, Anna is the only woman on the job site. I guess the guys there are your stereotypical construction workers, men, probably between 20 and 50 years old. Everyone she talks to here clearly has a deep respect for her.

Are you having fun out here? But who she is is something that she has to deal with as she meets new people all the time for this job. People that don't know me often think that I'm here as an intern or people will ask if I'm at work with my father. I get that a lot just because I guess I look young. But to me it's just going to work like everyone else does. I go to work and I do my job.

What does it matter what I look like her if I'm a girl or a boy? You get someone like Anna in here. It kind of changes that stereotypical idea you have of an engineer. This is Anna's boss. Jim Hoy, I'm the assistant construction engineer for District 2. Jim says if people underestimate her, it really doesn't last long. She's one of the more knowledgeable people he's worked with, and she's contagiously happy in the workplace.

Yeah, she definitely. He definitely livens up your day. Stealing it from the old orange juice commercial. You know, a day without Anna is like a day without sunshine, you know. He says he was originally worried that she would be too nice and would have trouble holding contractors to their agreements, which is a big part of the job. But he found out pretty quick, she has no problem laying down the law.

Definitely. She does it in a way that you don't even know she's getting what she wants. We're walking back to the car, and someone Anna knows is yelling to her from the other side of the job site. It's a local police sergeant who looks over the construction crews around here. He and Anna worked together a lot. I asked him to tell me what he thought of Anna. Tough as they come, smart, and she'll call you out when you're not doing your job.

That's who Anna is. Did she ever call you out? No, because I'm always doing my job. Couldn't have enough good things to say about her. And then he said that she just made him a nice cap. What do you mean she made you a nice cap? She made me a nice, thin blue line of police cap. Like, she knit it?

She knit it. Yeah, she nits too. She's an engineer. She knits. She's a firefighter. She does it all. What else can you ask for in a woman? One day in 2017, Anna was parking her car for work at the fire department, which was

close by to the job site she was working. The fire captain was there, and they started talking, and he offered her a tour of the station. He said that they were always looking for volunteers, people to train to respond to local fires whenever they could. I filled that application out brought it the next day. I remember calling my sister freaking out being like, oh my God, Megan, you'll never guess it just happened. Like screaming, I was so excited. And she's like, that's like the least surprising thing you could have done. We'll get back to the story in a second.

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Boots. Turn out pants. Foot on. Suspenders. Velcro. Clip. Jacket. Zip.

Flap at the top. Helmet. Run to the truck and go. In case it's not clear here, that's Anna driving the fire truck. It's one of her favorite parts of the job. The people she grew up with are pretty surprised when they hear that she can drive. one. Even her mom can't get used to it when Anna's visiting back home. Yeah, I was bringing my mom to a doctor's appointment and I was backing into a parking spot, a parking garage. And my mom is being a

typical mother and she's like, watch yourself, like, do you sure you have enough space? I'm like, mom, I drive a freaking fire truck. I think I can back into a parking space with your little sedan. Yeah, she's a badass. She's a badass. No doubt about it. That's Anna's captain, Patrick Eli. He's the guy who first gave Anna the application in the parking lot and is trained. Anna since the start. And she has been just awesome part of this fire department. She's very much involved with all aspects. She has proven herself on multiple different occasions to be dependable. You know, if somebody was down, she'd do everything she could to get you out and she wouldn't leave you. So she's very dependable. And I find her extremely tough with a gentle undertone.

That's just the way I see her. So. Pat is not the only one. Just like in her construction work, whoever knows Anna and sees her in action has a deep respect for her, no matter who she is or what she looks like. You know, the thing is, is when you put a mask on your face and you put your helmet on, you're just like the next guy. And no one's going to differentiate between that. As long as you're doing the job, there is no differentiation. I mean, you can't tell who's who most of the time when you're fully geared up with your airpack on and gloves and helmet. I mean, unless you're, you know, especially in a smoky environment, and you're just hoping that person behind you knows their job. I definitely stand out because they're like, wow, that's a really little guy. Like, there was one fire where they took a picture of a group of us, and I'm like, oh my God, I look like a child.

You know, there's that. But then I can fit in really small spaces, so like there's pros to it. In the last two years, Anna's responded to somewhere between 150 and 200 calls. And when she talks about all this, she gets this really intense, slightly maniacal look in her eyes. I want to do it. I need to do it. I asked her if she remembers the first time she responded to a fire call. Oh my God, I was so excited.

That sounds terrible to say. I mean, I was just like, the adrenaline is unbelievable. Most of the fires, the bigger structure fires I've had are middle of the night. So you're passed out and you just hear the tone. You wake up and you hear structure of fire. You hear that and you go from like sleepy to 100% of the sound. awake and your heart is racing. So you're just trying to get everything together, get out the door, get there to get your engine and go. That first fire, it was a big one in a smaller town.

It was a house on top of a hill. I remember looking up on the hill and you just saw the light from the fire. So you just saw it burning. You saw some of the smoke, but it was just this glow, really. So it was like, oh my God. And just kind of like almost speechless, awestruck. You watch it grow and you see it and it's almost pretty in a way. And then you're like, It's not, though, because it's destroying someone's property, but you just can see how you can lose something so quickly. You don't want those calls, but also, like, that's what you do. It's like an adrenaline rush to get them because you know it's going to be chaos. It's going to be a really intense situation.

But it's also heartbreaking because you see somebody that's losing everything. That house was total loss. It burned to the ground pretty much. When someone calls 911, they're having the worst day of their lives. Nobody calls 911 because they're having a good day. Fire captain Patrick Eli again, who's in charge of training recruits like Anna for moments like that. And the one thing I tell new people is it's not your emergency.

It's their emergency. You're the person responsible for making a difference for that person's day. That's why we do training on such a regular basis so that we're all on the same page about things. But the reason is that you're extremely proficient because you only have seconds to make a difference. A lot of work environments are collaborative. But as far as civilian jobs go, this is one where you depend on the person next to you for survival.

Absolutely. You have to trust these people. It's life and death. So they are your family. And we're really lucky to have each other. They welcome you in and they include you with everything. And again, I think you just see things that most people don't see. So you have that unique bond.

built in that you don't share with everybody. Regardless of volunteering to run into a burning building, being a firefighter has nothing to do with having a death wish. No firefighter will tell you that it does. But you're close to death. It's a job where you have to look it right

in the face in order to be good at what you do. Anna knows that. And despite her job, she says she really doesn't think about it that much. The thing is, you don't have a choice. You're going to go when you go. I think there's some sort of plan or whatever. So, I mean, if I have to go and it's doing what I love, like, what more can I ask for? Do you think you'll ever stop fighting fires?

God, I hope not. I imagine you as a little old granny in full gear running into a fire. That would be so awesome. I think as far as jobs go, there's a lot of stereotypes about who works different jobs or who's allowed to. We have subconscious images in our heads of what a plumber. looks like, what a secretary looks like, what a politician looks like. Anna Nadler is just one of the many people who can remind us that those stereotypes are nonsense. The only thing they do is prevent people from picturing themselves in the jobs that they

truly want to do and should be doing. There are a lot of people along the way that tell you you can't do things. Just go right through it. You got to keep going. Whether she's wearing a hard hat at a bridge demolition or behind the wheel of a fire truck, Anna Nadler might not be who you expect to see doing that job, but she is exactly the person that you want doing them. Not everybody wants to run into a burning building,

so if I have that desire to do that and help out people if I can, how could I not act upon that? You know, not many people want to, because you sound like you're nuts if you do. So if I have that urge and that drive to do that, how could I not do that? You see it as kind of a responsibility? Yeah, I feel obligated to. Again, I'm willing to do it, so how could I not?

I mean, do you want to run into a burning building? I'm curious, but if I was in front of it, I don't know. Only one way to find out. For On the Job, from a comfy chair in a room that's not on fire, I'm Otis Gray. Thanks for listening to On The Job. Brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. Find out more at ExpressPros.com. This season of On The Job is produced by Audiation and Red Seat Ventures.

Our executive producer is Sandy Smallins. Our producer is Otis Gray. The show is mixed by Matt Noble at the loft in Bronxville, New York. Find us on IHeart Radio and Apple Podcasts. If you liked what you heard, please consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We'll see you next time for more inspiring stories about discovering your life's work. Service opens doors. And at American Military University,

it can open doors for the whole family. If you have a loved one who served in the military, you may qualify for reduced tuition. AMU offers flexible online programs designed to fit your schedule so you can keep moving forward wherever life takes you. Learn more at AMU. APUS.org slash military. Open doors to the future for you and your family

with the help of American Military University. That's AMU. APUS.edu slash military. Make every day feel epic in the all-new Hyundai Palisade hybrid. The Palisade Hybrid is packed full of features, cutting edge tech, and up to an EPA estimated 619 miles of range on select trims and class leading interior space.

Seating configurations for 7-8 passengers, available H-track all-wheel drive, so you can be ready to go anywhere in style. Learn more about the Hyundai Palisade at Hyundai USA.com. Call 562-314-4-603 for complete details. And now for a bit of breaking news between your breaking news, with me, the Gecko. Here are some things you ought to know today.

People who switch their car insurance to Geico save about $900 a year. Experts are calling that nice to know. Also, plants can hear when bees buzz. My phycus just heard that. And finally, animal experts have confirmed that goats have regional accents. I'm getting a hint of Irish that. It feels good to get good news. It feels good to Geico.

The Disneyland Resort is everything. We came to play the Calliway. It felt like I was in the round-up game with Woody and Pixar Piers. Have you been holding out on us? No, just showing you where the real Hollywood stars are. Like Tiana's Bayou Adventure. Oh, there's jazz, right?

And a drop. You'll see. Grab a Mickey pretzel on the way. Girl, you'll read in my mind. We're almost there. Disney California Adventure Park and Disneyland Park. We came to play. Part tickets and reservations requires subject to restrictions change and cancellation without notice.

Visit Disneyland.com for details. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.