It apppears that fire and ambulance departments aren’t the only ones who are having difficulty screening applicants. Dave Statter at STATter911 has a very bizarre story this morning about a small-town police captain who showed up at a VFD banquet, uninvited and drunk. Security cameras show him outside stealing a FD command car and driving away in it. I suppose we should refer to him as a “former police captain,” now. Read Dave’s entire article about this weird situation HERE and learn from it.
There is one item in the article that I’d like to point out: On a Web page created on the popular social networking Web site LinkedIn, Mosher lists himself as a “volunteer operations captain” with Prince William County fire department, but sources say he has not been an active volunteer firefighter for at least nine years.
I point that out because it is a good illustration of why most private corporations are now utilizing internet searches as part of their background investigations into both new-hire applicants and periodic reviews of the upper-level managers/officers. One of the common personality traits of dubious characters is their desire to be noticed on a universal level and they do that by either inventing things about themselves or bragging about some questionable activities they have been engaged in. If this clown’s PD had run a routine check on him, including a social media search, they would have come across that claim and his basic lack of honesty would have been exposed.
It’s a shame that it has come to this, but as our cultural integrity continues to decline, we have to do things we never had to before. Will organizations routinely do similar searches of all their members eventually? Or perhaps only people applying for promotion? How about anybody who is already in a position of leadership or influence? There is no privacy issue here. Once you post something online for the world to see, anybody in the world is allowed to look at it.
Let me switch focus here and mention something that has always been a pet peeve of mine. I’m referring to the practice of some people wearing sunglasses when they are performing a function where their use creates a distracting impression. A couple of examples: Take a look anytime you see a group of uniformed firefighters participating in a parade and marching down the street. There will always be a significant number of them wearing sunglasses and, to me that destroys the whole image of a positive apperance and uniformity. This is especially egregious when the group is particularly demanding of attention like a pipe band is. It’s a “fingernails on the blackboard” effect on me when I see a handful of marchers wearing their shades. It disrupts the entire visual effect.
The other example that brought this to mind was exposed in a video that we posted yesterday that showed an engine company pulling a hand line. It was obviously staged for the camera crew and presented as a “drill.” But the nozzleman was not only missing his SCBA in the video, but he was wearing sunglasses. Why? Why did he have them on in the first place? It completely trivialized the importance of the whole evolution. That bugs me!
We’d better take our shades off now and get this equipment checked out. We’re running late this morning and I have to get the coffee started. See you back in the day room.
