One of my first jobs out of high school was selling uniforms and related equipment to everyone from factory workers to firefighters and policemen. I got that job as a mercy hire. I was working for a competitor and my boss at that company was the father of one of my best high school buds. What I did to lose that job will be covered if I write the prequel to this post.Small police departments didn't have the clout to place certain orders at a good price, so they used us. I got a call from a medium-sized police department on the western slope and made my biggest sale ever. The chief was ordering new gold badges for all of his detectives, and needed them for a ceremony they were having. He ordered them with plenty of notice, so there would be no problem.
You don't order badges, you build them. You start with a foundation and add emblems and swirls and nameplates, and then you color them. The manufacturer thought terms like Rhodium and Rho_Glo were good ideas to use instead of, oh, I don't know, simple terms like GOLD and SILVER! I got it in my head that Rho-Glo was gold, and ordered the badges. They were to come in about a week before they were needed. They did. They were wrong.
As I proudly opened the box upon their arrival, I was already spending my commission in my head. I'm not sure, but my reaction may have been that of a 6 year-old girl spotting a snake on the p
layground. That was the sound in my head, anyway. I immediately looked around for someone to blame. If only that stupid company used Gold and Silver. How hard would that be? It was their fault, I reasoned, not mine.When we are young and immature, taking personal responsibility is not our first impulse. As we grow, that's supposed to change. The problem with this county, with this world, it that it doesn't. We set things in motion and fail see that the motion is almost always perpetual. The results along the way and at the end are a result of what we did at the beginning. It's our doing. The results are ours. Renee Zellweger has a powerful line as Ruby in the movie Cold Mountain. "They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!'"
When a train derails the government sends teams of investigators from a dozen different agencies to discover why it happened. The importance of this is clear - to try to do all we can to keep it from happening again. But in truth, it's going to happen again. It's the people who go to the site and get the train back on the track and moving that have the biggest impact on the most people.
We need less investigations and more solutions.
3 comments:
On Monday, when Dr. ___ announced that the graduate students would meet during the last 5 minutes of class to dicuss and submit their assignment, I freaked. What assignment? We had an assignment? I whipped out my syllabus. Yup, our bibliography was due with a thesis for our paper. Ugh. Oh wait! She never gave me the research paper info paper! And I sent her an e-mail two weeks ago to remind her that she didn't have enough for everyone, and so I got shorted! She never put one in my mailbox liked she said! It was HER fault that my assignment wasn't done, and I wasn't going to take that CRAP!
Of course, I did have the assignment written in my planner, so I could've done SOMETHING anyway, but SHE was the cause, NOT I!
The investigation of my train wreck is still underway. ;o)
I've heard it said that character is the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life. In a country where personal freedom is viewed as an entitlement, the freedom most pursued is the freedom from responsibility...............thereby releasing me of anything having to do with this post.
Well written article.
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