My career…

When I was a kid I always had a soft heart. For animals, I once found a cat with one eye missing and rode my bike across towns to take her to a veterinarian. I thought myself a hero but he explained that the kitten was probably born that way.

My mom took me to see West Side Story and the music really moved me. Here come the Jets reved me up while There’s a Place for us brought tears to my eyes. My mom was an idealist and so too I felt that I wanted to help people. My Dad, much more the realist, said you can’t help anyone else until you can take care of yourself. A recent quote from Shaquille O’Neal reflected that sentiment. His father told him, the best way to help poor people is not to be one. Something or one thing I’ve learned in 74 years is that Everybody has there struggles. Nonetheless, I went to school, graduated college to avoid the draft as long as possible and got first SC State Job at The School for the Deaf and Blind and married Tess. My next job was in Child Protective Services at DSS. Then to Continuum of Care for Emotionally the Disturbed  and then back to DSS as Job Developer. During these years I taught myself Microsoft Office and developed a database to track my job placements wherein I had a quota, like billing Medicaid hours for COC so in many ways it was just like Radio Shack or Sears. Numbers Count! Ok so I hope through all of those years I helped some people and I think the Job placements were the most tangible and productive of that… but the story for today is that in those years where I tracked every nickel of expense in my database and reduced expenses over a million dollars, I met and talked with Governor Mark Sanford about my database and I wanted it to be adopted state wide to save money in all the counties. He was polite and showed som interest but nothing came of it. Later he was quoted in the news saying that the state was leaking money. I wrote him a letter saying that there was a gusher of money leaking from DSS and resent my paperwork showing all the money I had saved. This time I got a call from DSS State Office wanting to talk to me about my program. Now these were the same people I had been presenting to over the past 5 years with no impact ( oh yeah they tried to duplicate my program using Approach but it didn’t work). Anyway this invitation occurred literally within weeks of my 30 year retirement and after some discussion with Tess I said Bye bye and did very well for the next few years teaching at Spartanburg Texh. 

Sanford meanwhile took off in a state car saying he was in the Appalachian Trail when in fact he had run off with a woman he had met leaving his wife and five kids behind. I have now been happily retired for the past 14 years knowing that I left DSS faithfully fulfilling my responsibilities, leaving 100 unused sick days behind and a database that helped me do my job while saving public funds.  All of this was pretty much ancient history until this morning when I found Mark Sanford featured in a Netflix documentary about a “Christian” organization calling themselves The Family. Wow! All I can say this morning is Thank God for Tess and Our Family. I never achieved what I thought I wanted to achieve in my career. But I had a good job and I did a good job and that, by observation of everything else, was Good Enough. Or as Tess would tease me, it was Great!