The Bitching Thread

[Animeniax]

Do you reckon your chances might be better if you tried again in some less conservative state and a city/town with less fierce competition? The USA is a helluva big country, after all, so you should have lots of options. Unless they systematically drop applicants who were dropped elsewhere for any reason. I imagine if you got in anywhere and had a spotless record of a number of years, it would be far easier then to move back to a place where you'd rather spend the rest of your career in.

Yeah at this point I'm thinking that might be the real point of this entire mess... some karmic alignment that will force me to move to a city/town more suited to me. I don't really like Austin, but I do have a house here. But the weather, people, traffic, and mindset of the locals really don't jive with me. I'm just not sure where else I could/would want to live and work.

You just don't get it, and that's the saddest part. You're almost there though.

(A) Intentionally not disclosing prior drug use (because you were afraid it would disqualify you for a job where drug enforcement in involved).

(B) Intentionally not disclosing a trip to China (or Iran, or Pakistan, or Syria, or Russia, etc.) for a job that requires US security clearance.

(A) and (B) are exactly the same. Like I said several posts back, It's not what you left off, it's not whether it is drug use, a drug misdemeanor, a trip to visit family in China, a business trip, the 2008 Olympics, or a trip to Canada, or that for four months you lived with a now ex-girlfriend.

Get this through your head: It isn't the prior act. It is that you lied about it, and they caught you (because you told them). Honestly, how were they even going to find out about recreational drug use? At least with a trip to China while trying to get a job that requires US clearance, they can actually look up customs records, or off your passport.

A person who manges to do that, whatever the omission is, doesn't just suddenly appear like they might not be trusted, they just proved that they can't be trusted. I don't know how you can't see the obvious parallel.

Nope, you're still mostly wrong. When the reviewer cop told me I'd been disqualified, he specifically mentioned how prior drug use in my 30s was significantly more damning than if it had been in my teens or early twenties, aside from the fact that I did not admit to it on the applications. Partly because it adds to the deception since it makes my omission more willful since the use only occurred a couple years ago so I couldn't say I forgot about it. But also because he couldn't trust that it was purely experimentation or that it was done for the purpose I stated, which was to "get my feet wet" before jumping into the pool that is police work. He made that point clear, that experimentation with drugs occurs when you're in your teens, not as a 30-something.

They would have found out about the drug use because of the polygraph test that they administer. Do you administer a poly for security clearances?