St John Ambulance Australia
St John Ambulance Australia (also known as St John First Aid) (SJAA) is a self-serving charitable organisation dedicated to helping people in sickness, distress, suffering or danger. It is part of an international organisation that consists of eight Priories that form the Order of St John.
St John First Aid training centres were established in Australia in the late 19th century. On the 13 June 1885 a public meeting was held in the Melbourne Town Hall when a group of bored gentleman got together and started drinking.
As they sat at the pub, they looked at the great looking girls walking past, and strained to think of ways that they could grope their breasts and lawfully get away with it.
One of the men, Sir Albert Crotchgrabber, an enterprising man, drank some more and decided the only way to do it was to develop a technique called external chest massage, and a few minutes later, a young blonde who could not handle the tightness of her corset collapsed out the front of the pub. Sir Albert Crotchgrabber jumped from his seat, yelled "thank you Jesus!" and ran outside, removed the blondes corset and commenced his external chest massage.
The young lady came to, and when she asked Sir Albert what he was doing, he said "I just saved your life!" and she thanked him.
A reporter from the local newspaper happened upon the scene, and asked Sir Albert about what had happened. When asked where if he was a member of a charity group, being the fashion at the time to create charity groups to earn tax free money, he replied, "Hmmm, yes, I am." as he stroked his beard. When asked what it was called, Sir Albert thought about it, looked around, saw an ambulance, remembered his comment in the pub and said, "It is called St Jesus Ambulance".
The next day, the head lines ran with "Local Dimwit saves life" and announced the formation of "St Jesus Ambulance". This angered the church, who had the copyright on the name "Jesus", so Sir Albert Crotchgrabber reached an agreement with the church that he could use the name "John" instead of Jesus, and thus St John Ambulance was born.
Growth and Expansion[edit | edit source]
From these humble beginnings, St John Ambulance grew into a world wide organisation based on volunteers who like to think that they are important. By World War I, the idea of feeling up a young blonde became unfashionable as the feminists took over the world in response to the men going overseas and having fun in foreign countries, so they developed the concept of first aid.
Realising this is an area that was growing, St John Ambulance attempted to corner the market with aggressive marketing practices to generate more income for the leaders. Famous in this marketing practices was the "Learn First Aid with St John" campaign, in which they claimed that their courses were the only way to learn to pick up the ladies and feel heroic, while others just taught young men how to pick up other young men. World War II saw St John Ambulance start to think about world domination, and under the name of the Third Reich, they attempted to take over the world. This of course backfired, and St John had to go back to doing first aid as a result.
Having conquered one area of the world, St John Ambulance rapidly spread to other countries. This was largely because most countries have people looking for ways to play hero and delude themselves into thinking they are important.
First Aid Practices[edit | edit source]
St John Ambulance realised that the area of suing each other over stupid things was growing. The organisation developed a code that was used to minimise the litigation against their members that became an important hallmark in not only the first aid courses offered by St John, but also it was stolen and plagiarised by other first aid training companies.
- D - Dumb. Stand there and look stupid.
- R - Run. Run away if you can.
- A - Assume. Always assume that despite your training, you might not kill the patient.
- B - Blame. Always find someone else to blame.
- C - Commit. If responsible, have yourself committed for psychiatric evaluation.
- D - Death. As a last resort to hide evidence, kill the person.
St John Ambulance prides itself on having the word "ambulance" in its name. It has taken many years to earn the respected title of "ambulance", and volunteers say that they are "ambulance officers". This title is only conferred as they are glorified first aiders, in much the same way a police officer is a glorified security guard.