Lately I have been thinking about some things in the past, particularly around the reasons I went into various career paths.

Through my life I have had three careers, law enforcement, teaching, and business.

When I was in my early twenties I started a career in law enforcement. The reason I went into law enforcement was that I wanted to help people. Within a year and a half I found that not only was I not helping people, I was becoming truly jaded and cynical about people in general. As a police officer I basically dealt with two types of people, the worst that society had to offer and good people, often in some of the worst circumstances in their lives.

The worst that society has to offer are those who willingly and flagrantly choose to break the law with no remorse. I do not include those with most traffic violations in this, those who lose their temper and act out in minor ways, etc. What I include in this category are abusive spouses, child abusers, drunk and/or reckless drivers, burglars, robbers, rapists, arsonist, murderers, drug dealers, etc. These types are a huge emotional drain on every LEO who ever donned a uniform.

Then there are the good people in bad situations. These run the range from people who made a bad choice and now have to deal with the consequences, victims of the first group, victims of accidents, loved ones of victims or crime, accidents, suicides, etc., the mentally ill, the homeless, the children of domestic disturbances, and many others. While there was some opportunity to help people here, that was not what my job was. My job was to investigate, find the reason that something happened, determine if a crime had been committed and, if so, make an arrest.

Once I came to the conclusion that I was not helping people, or at least not very many people, I decided to do something else. The criminals rarely corrected their ways after going to jail and were often back on the streets before I could even finish the paperwork. The good people were more often hurt by the actions I had to take than not. Traffic accidents had citations associated with them, domestic disturbances usually resulted in at least one person going to jail, victims and loved ones had to be questioned and often see loved ones go to jail, the homeless were sent on their way to :somewhere else”.

So, I left law enforcement and went to college. I earned my Bachelor’s in Secondary Math Education and then started teaching high school. Again, my goal was to help people. This was a worthwhile endeavor and I did help many of my students over a 12 year time frame. However, education in Florida became a game of teaching to the test It got so bad that the math department at the last school I taught at was handed scripts for or classes. We were told we would teach a particular topic on a certain day, we were told when we would give quizzes and tests, how to grade them, etc. So the days of helping kids get an education, navigate their way through adolescence, and grow into productive adults was at an end… as was my career as a teacher.

The next thing I decided to pursue was a career in the private sector. First I worked as a Regional Manager of a chain of retail stores. While doing this I earned an MBA and got married. This happened to coincide with the Great Recession in the 2007-2009 time frame. The chain of stores went belly-up and I was unemployed. So, I sold cars and then worked as a Sales Manager for another retail store. After getting laid off from that I ended working for a huge, multi-national HR Outsourcing company working with pension benefits. This is where I am currently working.

However, my passion is still in the area of helping people. To this day I still stop at traffic accidents when I see that there is no emergency personnel on scene, just to make sure that no-one needs help. I would really like to turn my career into an a position with an organization that has a mission of helping people.