Redirect

I am in a better place today. Last week at work was really awful. The work I do is important, people's lives can be affected if a mistake is made and not caught. I am a fingerprint technician and I work in an AFIS section. Let's say you are a nurse and the mistake I made links you to someone else's criminal record, say a drug conviction. How about this one, you apply to work with children and the fact that you are a registered sex offender isn't caught. There are checks and double checks inherent to the job I do to ensure that even if one person makes a mistake it won't slip through the system. In 8 years of working I have had very few errors. I was actually pretty good at what I do. In the last 3 months I have made 6 errors. That is pretty universally unheard of. This large number of errors require that a formal complaint be levied against me which would likely result in a demotion or possibly firing. Because this is a formal complaint I have the right to defend myself. I don't know why they held some of them instead of dealing with each as they came up but that is what they did. In the last 3 months I have also had a LOT of medication changes to manage the BiPolar Disorder. All of these new meds have drowsiness as a side effect. You can't read fingerprints and not be sharp. If you aren't sharp you will make mistakes. I have always been sharp and good at what I do so these errors which just seemed to be stacking up on me came as a real shock. These mistakes are directly linked to the meds I'm on which is my defense in this matter.

There is another element to this. That element is the environment I work in. It is negative and toxic. There is a pervasive us against them mentality. The technicians hate management and management hates the technicians. There are faults on both sides, neither side willing to ever give any ground to the other. My section doesn't work as a team, it works like warring factions. It is entirely political, you have to be really careful about who you trust and at all times keep in mind that you have few actual friends.

I started working for TXDPS in 1998. I started at the very bottom as a mail clerk in Accident Records. A year later I promoted 4 grades up to a fingerprint clerk. A little over a year after that I promoted 2 grades up to a fingerprint technician 1. A year after that I promoted to a fingerprint technician 2. The fingerprint section has 3 shifts. I started on graveyard, moved to evenings and finally made it to dayshift. Dayshift is where I began to have problems at work. They were minimal at first but have increased steadily over the span of time that I have worked on days. I stuck it out because my husbands health depends on the health insurance that my job provides. I also stuck it out because I knew I could do better, after all I already had. I could not or would not see that the environment I was in was making some of the BiPolar symptoms a real issue for me. I see it now.

When I return to work I plan for it not to be in fingerprints, even if that means taking a demotion. I believe I could mount a credible defense against the formal complaint and keep the job I have. Why would I ever want to do that? People working in other sections in my bureau never look as unhappy or angry as they do in fingerprints.

My psychiatrist has pulled me off of work for one month and put me in intensive outpatient therapy. She is furious with my work for holding my mistakes for over a month instead of giving them to me straight away so the problem could be dealt with. One of the 6 mistakes was given to me in January and she immediately lowered my dosage. Had the next mistake been given to me as it happened the others might have been averted.

So where am I right now? Right now I have a month to transform my life. Right now I get to heal, choose and change. It is a rare opportunity and I am going to take full advantage of it.