Whenever anyone would ask Low Water when he was going to retire, his reply was, "F**k all you c**ksuckers. I ain't gonna retire; I'm gonna die on the engine." I used that to great effect at Atk when the Young Turks would badger us about retiring. When I was a fireman in the ought-70s a lot of my fellow firemen had the same attitude towards the old heads, so all I can say is "plus le change, plus le mem chose". Or as Lou Monk, who was a really old head (c1910), told one of my era's old heads when that guy was a youngster (1940s), "Tell me a man's seniority, and I'll tell you what he's thinking."