Choices and Consequences
I’m writing about a poor choice I made a few years ago. To be exact it was 4 years, 8 months, and 15 days ago. You see on August 2nd, 2014 I was pulled over for suspicion of driving under the influence. I was guilty and so started my 4 years and 8 months and 15 days of tremendous stress. This includes Lawyer fees for thousands of dollars, the embarrassment of notifying my work managers of my situation, and also the risk of losing my Federal job. This is behind me now. Totally. I have been fully adjudicated and on April 17th, 2019, at 3:22pm did it end. It ended with the notification that my security clearance was renewed after a 1.5 year re-investigation. I very lucky and grateful that this did cause me to lose my clearance but it sure did not help it. Of course any repeat of this would definitely not be considered and that would be the end of my career. The lesson I have learned is this. You have to play by the rules. You are not special.
I’m writing about a poor choice I made a few years ago. To be exact it was 4 years, 8 months, and 15 days ago. You see on August 2nd, 2014 I was pulled over for suspicion of driving under the influence. I was guilty and so started my 4 years and 8 months and 15 days of tremendous stress. This includes Lawyer fees for thousands of dollars, the embarrassment of notifying my work managers of my situation, and also the risk of losing my Federal job. This is behind me now. Totally. I have been fully adjudicated and on April 17th, 2019, at 3:22pm did it end. It ended with the notification that my security clearance was renewed after a 1.5 year re-investigation. I very lucky and grateful that this did cause me to lose my clearance but it sure did not help it. Of course any repeat of this would definitely not be considered and that would be the end of my career. The lesson I have learned is this. You have to play by the rules. You are not special.
The ultimate result of my arrest was I was convicted of reckless driving and I did not get a DUI. However I still had to pay the penalty regardless. I immediately lost my license and was not allowed to drive at all for 7 days. After that I had a court order to install a device in my car that you have to breathe into to start it. This device analyzes your breath for any detection of alcohol. While driving it would randomly require another sample of your breath and you had to blow in it while driving. Talk about public shaming. This was really embarassing to have to blow into while driving.