Y'all Know the NSA Must Love These Posts

Stuff is happening.  Life is busy but still feels fairly peaceful and zen-like.  The balance is cool.  I'm learning and growing and branching out.  That's cool too.  I'm trying a few new things here and there, leaps into the unknown.  One of those things is kind of a big deal.  It involves background checks and stuff.

I've had a few background checks over the years.  None of them have been particularly thorough, it seems.  This time I decided, on the spur of the moment and mostly due to my spectacularly bad judgment in the face of a potentially good story, to tell the powers that be about the time I was briefly a suspect in the Unabomber investigation.  Not, maybe, the smartest thing I could have done. 

But it was worth it.  The look on that one guy's face was so worth it.  

When considering a leap into the unknown you need a mentor - someone who has been there and leaped that.  I am often a loner, professionally speaking.   In the past five or six years, I've realized I am not good at asking questions.  I tend to watch and learn and attempt the new skill on my own.  That's not necessarily bad, but I don't ask for help.  There are a lot of times I don't even know what questions to ask.  It's something I'm working on.  One way I'm doing that is by finding a mentor and allowing them to actually mentor me, which is inexplicably difficult.

I met with my mentor a couple of days after the background check meeting and confessed my confession.  

Imagine my surprise when she said "That's almost as good as my bomb story."  

Her story involved a practical joke which resulted in the mobilization of the bomb squad from the local air force base, the police department, a paid security agency and the entire administrative team of the local hospital.  

When I finally stopped laughing, I thought "Damn, God.  You really know how to bring the right people together at the right time."  

This mentor thing is going to work but I fully expect that we will get ourselves arrested at some point in the future.  And it will be glorious.