Everyone has bad days at work. Sometimes a bad day can stretch into two or three, or maybe even a bad week. But, have you ever gone into work knowing deep down in your guts that this is the day you’re going to get fired? When I got my first job as a police officer with the Hillsborough Police Department back in 1991, that is how I felt every day that I went in to work.
For four weeks.
When I put on my blue uniform and started field training for the first time, I was assigned a training officer that seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure from torturing me from the moment I showed up at work until the second I left. I imagine when he went home, he must have had a few puppies in the house that he could kick just to get him through the off hours until he could start tormenting me again the next day.
Let’s call the guy, “Dave,” because his name was Dave and I have no interest in trying to come up with a fake name to protect his reputation.
I don’t know how he managed to become a training officer in the first place. Perhaps Lucifer himself promoted him to the position. The devil doesn’t have time to torture everyone personally, so he probably decided Dave would be a good substitute in his absence.
Dave never missed an opportunity to berate me or make me feel stupid. Every day I went to work, I was convinced that I would be fired before the day was over. I had a knot in my stomach that didn’t go away for a month.
I remember on a traffic stop, while I was talking to a driver who had failed to stop at a stop sign, Dave stood behind me and told me that my officer safety was lousy because I had parked my car too close to the car in front of me and I had forgotten to turn the front end of my car out into traffic to protect myself from traffic in the roadway.
Legitimate points, perhaps, but nothing that couldn’t wait until after I had completed my contact with the driver. Dave didn’t see things that way. Yelling at me was a high point in his day and he wasn’t going to wait if he saw an opportunity to do it. The driver of the car did not fail to notice what was happening either. As he signed the traffic ticket I had written, he shook his head and mouthed the words, “I feel sorry for you.”
Okay, maybe I imagined that last part.
Despite his love of telling me what a terrible cop I was, Dave wasn’t exactly a pillar of the policing community himself. We worked the graveyard shift, and I recall many nights that Dave would direct me to park the patrol car in the driveway of his house. He handed me a copy of the Field Training Guide and told me to “study the book” while he went inside the house to “take care of some stuff.”
“Take care of some stuff” was code for crawl into bed and go to sleep. I would be sitting in the patrol car reading department procedures and legal texts while Dave had himself a nice nap. I sometimes wouldn’t see him for half the shift before he came back outside with his hair mussed up and pillow lines embedded in his cheek.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. The nights that Dave left me in the car by myself were the happiest nights I had when I was training with that guy.
Somehow, I survived those four weeks and moved on to my next Training Officer, Nick.
During my first shift with Nick, he climbed into the car holding a Styrofoam cup full of coffee. He told me, “Let’s go get a newspaper, and if you make me spill my coffee before we get there, you’re fired.”
I thought, Oh, hell, here we go again. Different guy, same evil shit.
When Nick saw the look on my face at his comment, he put down his coffee and ordered me to pull over the car. I pulled up to the curb and stopped. As I was preparing to hand over my gun and badge and walk home, I heard Nick mutter, “That mother f**ker. They never should have given him a new trainee.”
“Huh?” I asked with my usual incisive wit.
He asked me, “What did Dave do to you? We need to find a way to get your head unf**ked before you hurt yourself. For starters, forget everything Dave ever told you.”
I think that was the first time in over a month I was able to take a full breath. Life got much easier from that day forward. I discovered that you didn’t have to be an absolute tool to be a Training Officer, and that mistakes could be opportunities to learn something. It soon became apparent that most of the other officers at the department didn’t have too much love for Dave, either.
Things got even better about three years later when Dave got fired for violating department policy and then lying about it during the Internal Affairs investigation.
I’ll be honest with you, I threw a little party for myself that day.
Karma can truly be a magnificent bitch.
So, the next time you think you are having a bad day, even if it is absolutely the worst day at work you have ever experienced, just remember it could be worse.
You could work with Dave.
.
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