Andrea sometimes gets annoyed with me when I lock doors, “Why’d you lock me out? I wasn’t gone that long!” She may roll her eyes when I ask her to secure belongings, “Ugh! No one’s going to walk off with that.” She’s amused with my idiosyncrasies, “I’ll take this seat since I know you don’t like to sit with your back to the door.”
I don’t think I was always like this. Maybe I was just having flashbacks.
A prior contract required that I have a top-secret clearance. Once this was acquired, I was read onto a project, and the details of the operation were spelled out. I thought, “Oh. That’s cool.” As I sat there, the briefing continued and the need for operational security (OpSec) was hammered home. The possible ramifications started to sink in, and I found myself thinking, “Oh. Crap, this could get dicey.”
After onboarding and more security training and briefings, I was on a team that rotated out into the field on a regular basis. During one of these junkets there was a lull in the process, and I wound up in a conversation with one of the local Feds. He was relaying a recent security incident they’d had. With a shake of his head and a grim smile, he mentioned they’d managed the issue. Dude went on with a pretty passionate monologue about his take on OpSec.
“I went through FLETC. I’ve been trained in counter-surveillance, small arms, and hand-to-hand combat. I’m the hard target. If I was a bad guy trying to compromise this operation, I wouldn’t come after me. Pfft. I’d be gunning for you.”
It was a sobering conversation, and it was my turn to smile grimly.
That was the only job, apart from my brief stint with the Navy, where someone could die if mistakes were made. This gave me a certain clarity on every post I’ve had since that time. There have been multiple occasions when my boss would be stressing because of a deliverable, technical hurdle, or a time constraint.
“Look, Boss, if we royally screw this up, is anyone going to die?”
“Umm. No.”
“We’ve already avoided worst case scenario. Oh, by the way, we’re not going to screw this up.”
That tended to reframe the panicked perspective and rechanneled any nervous energy into more productive outlets. However, the toll of that clarifying perspective is I lock my doors, secure my stuff, and sit facing the door.
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