So late last week was my
mental health check up to make sure I am safe to carry a gun. The TL/DR sum up is: "safe enough for now, and besides we can't fire you, the overtime would be atrocious."
If that doesn't settle your mind about my fit for duty status, read on, you'll see that it's either much much worse than that, or no big deal at all.
I went into detail last week about the hippie shit I expected to deal with in this session. You may or may not recall that I'm not fond of hippies in general, and there are only two that I really like. They're also the only two I don't want to punch in the face.
The good news, was that this session did not involve the same hippie shit head I expected. It involved an entirely new one. As in, just fucking graduated or whatever it's called when a PhD decides he's had enough schooling and want to go inflict himself upon others. His sheepskin, honest to Cthulu had a date from earlier this summer. This summer that isn't over yet.
I wasn't as disturbed by that as one might think. After all, a brand new degree in listening to self-pitying losers lie about themselves must be just as valid as an old one, right? Some of the best cops I've met are still within their first five years of being a cop. (The fifth year is when a cop is either going to quit, die, or be just fine as a cop. It's typically when he's got enough experience to make himself complacent. It's a dangerous year. After that year, on the job deaths drop significantly.) So his being green wasn't a big deal for me.
The big deal was that the first thing he said to me was an obvious lie. I saw he had four or five posters on the wall of his alma mater, A&M, as well as a few knick-knacks on his desk from the same. I said, in what I wanted to be a relatively un-mean voice, "An aggie, huh?"
"Well, I don't really get into that whole college thing. It doesn't matter where you went, just that you went to school."
"Listen, kid, you'll do a lot better at this job if you don't assume your patients are stupid. Don't fucking lie to me and I won't find a reason to have your car towed."
"You're pretty hostile."
"I don't like you, your profession, nor the idea that a punk like you can have anything useful to say to me besides 'yes sir, sorry sir.' This is a waste of time, I've been awake for 17 1/2 hours and I want to go home and sleep."
 |
| Pretty much exactly like this. |
It took another ten minutes before he was convinced that I wasn't sleepy because of depression or from having committed suicide or something. He couldn't understand night shift. Literally did not know how it worked.
"You work at night?"
"Yeah..."
"How can you do that? Why do you work at night?"
"Do you eat paint chips often, or just this morning?"
I knew it was a ploy to get me to share my feelings, and probably pin the blame on my folks for being as fucked up as he obviously thought I am (after all, I don't even have a masters degree, yet...).
"Doc, I'm not a sharer. We need to end this so I can go to sleep."
"I can't let you go back to work until I know you're safe. To do that, you need to share."
"I don't share. I'm not a sharer."
"That's not a word. Tell me about yourself. Where did you grow up?"
"Seriously? This is what you sank yourself into debt for? This is why you've moved to bum-fuck Texas to have the VA pay off your student loans, to ask me where I grew up? You know that's playing minor league ball, right? You'll get murdered in the majors."
"Why don't you like to share?"
"You're not my wife, you're not my friend, you're not my partner. That's it. Those are the people who get shared with. Now fuck off, I'm done."
And we sat there in silence for twenty minutes. I am required to attend these things, but I am not required to say anything, so I didn't. He asked a few more questions, I went to sleep. I woke up and he was typing, said I could go.
"So, Doc, am I safe to carry a gun? Did you do your job?"
"You're safe enough for now."
I call it a success.
