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The number of questions this revelation offers me are seemingly limitless…
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wow…..fishin wow….
Many questions , yes. A lot of funky answers also.Report
Could it be that firearms discharging near people getting in to and out of vehicles is reasonably commonplace in Iran?Report
I suppose so. But our SS didn’t respond?Report
Could it be that firearms discharging near people getting in to and out of vehicles is reasonably commonplace in Iran?
Hey, it’s reasonably commonplace in certain areas of the US, too.
But our SS didn’t respond?
Yes, if by “respond”, you mean “called Colombian prostitutes”. Job’s stressful, you know.Report
Ahmadinejad was well aware that firearms pose no danger when used by someone who’s trained and responsible.Report
True — maybe he was armed too. That would explain why he was so polite about it.Report
Interesting find.Report
Store guns with open breech?Report
If a civilian had done that, he’d have been arrested, most likely convicted and done time.
The SS agent should have been fired.Report
The union had an inquiry and found that procedures were followed.Report
Of course they did. They always do.
It’s beyond me how you can follow proceedures and still discharge a weapon in an unsafe manner unless the weapon malfunctioned. Baring that, it’s user error, and even if all proceedures were followed because no one would possible write a proceedure covering the accidental discharge of a firearm, he should have been fired for negligence.Report
It’s always interesting to see how different people interpet things. To me, if you spend your entire life handling dangerous things like guns, you’re going to fish things up occasionally, because you’re human. Firing people with otherwise good safety records on their first fishup does nothing to improve overall performance; it just maintains the fiction that perfection is possible.Report
This.
Last night on American Idol they showed the guy who coaches the singers berating a studio tech for a mistake, and boasting that he’d fired over 100 studio techs in his day. My first thought was to wonder how many outstanding employees he’d deprived himself of, and how many of those firing were schlubs he never would have had to deal with if he hadn’t fire one of the outstanding people.Report
I rewinded it twice in shock. I then assumed it was all fictional to present Jimmy Iovine as a tough guy. I could be wrong of course.Report
Well, fiction’s certainly a possibility. But to me it made him look like an idiot who desperately wants to find ways to prove toughness. But I’m glad to know someone else noticed it in the same way I did.Report
I agree he came across like an idiot pretending to be tough.Report
I dunno guys, there’s some merit in what you are saying, but…at the Secret Service level? This guy not only could have killed someone, he could have precipitated an international incident/war. You need to fire him, if for no other reason than to reassure Iran that the incident was accidental, not a threat (“Mr. Smith is no longer in our employ.”).
Anything less creates doubt in their mind that it was maybe intentional, or at minimum that there is (and that we tolerate) a level of incompetence that’s highly problematic at that level.
It’s not fair, maybe, but neither is life.Report
I’m less concerned about fairness than about not losing high quality people, and even high quality people make mistakes. I do think the point about reassuring Iran has some validity, but let’s be honest, Ahmadinejad knows we could take him out if we really wanted. He’s less likely to really believe there was nefarious intent than to find it a useful opportunity to pretend there was nefarious intent. And since he didn’t do that, I’m not sure there was any point in doing more than apologizing for the unfortunate accident and expressing relief that neither he nor any of his people were injured.Report
Ahmadinejad knows that:
A) we could take him out if we wanted and
B) that one of the last ways we’d take him out, if we decided to take him out, would ever be by having a secret service agent blow him away with a fishing shotugun in public.
I mean I’ve heard of shotgun diplomacy but gimmie a break!Report
Yeah, but again, I think not firing the guy gives an impression (and politics, ESPECIALLY at that level, is all about appearances), that we are either incompetent, or tolerate incompetence (that we are so weak and sentimental as to tolerate it).
Sorry. I’d fire the guy. I realize this is not fair to him, accidents happen, but the buck has to stop somewhere, and if it doesn’t stop at the Secret Service, where does it stop?Report
the buck has to stop somewhere, and if it doesn’t stop at the Secret Service, where does it stop?
Only Harry Truman knows.Report
There are certain problem domains where invincibility and infallibility are both necessities. Unrealistic necessities, but necessities nonetheless.
The Secret Service and the Special Forces spring to mind. Also the Nuclear Regulatory Agency.
To err is human, sure. To err in certain jobs, you gotta pay the piper. Examples must be made.Report
I have had some pretty decent errors at pretty much all of my post-college jobs. Errors that cost co-workers time… errors of judgment/delegation that cost myself (and co-workers) time. Anybody who has worked with computers would probably recognize each of my stories (“instead of rebooting ind3498b, I rebooted ind3498 and that brought the webpage down for 4 minutes.”)
Even though I know I’m biased on this, I can’t help but think that there’s a difference between the above and a job where I’m handling firearms around people.Report
I’m quite glad to say that I haven’t made any million-dollar-fuckups… yet. I know people who have around here.
These types of fuckups cost people’s lives, more surely than shooting a bullet does.Report
There is a difference. Since in both cases humans with human fallibility are involved, it becomes clear that it lies in the difference between firearms and web servers. This is why I’m unconvinced when I’m told that that scattering carry licenses around like Halloween candy has no downside because gun owners are careful, responsible people. They fish up too.Report
“I have had some pretty decent errors at pretty much all of my post-college jobs.”
Same here, even for my pre-college and during-college jobs.Report
The errors I made at the restaurant (or prior) didn’t really achieve the level of decency.Report
This is where we get into the tricky area of whether we respond to action or outcome.
If my index finger slips at the gas station while pumping gas, I might overfill my tank or go beyond how much I wanted to put in and end up grumbling about the extra 3-cents and how my credit card statement won’t have a nice round number there. But no one seeks to punish me.
This guy’s index finger slipped, likely in much the same way that mine did at the gas station, and no one got hurt so why should he be punished?
ON THE OTHER HAND…
This guy’s finger slip could have killed a man… and not just any man… but a man’s who death at that guy’s hand could have legitimately started a world war. And that guy was only in a position to have such a powerful finger slip because he was trained and trusted to prevent such deaths from happening so that world wars could be avoided.
Assuming this was a complete and genuine accident, I’d argue some discipline was warranted but not necessarily termination.Report
And you need to make it clear that you’re not firing him for missing.Report
I’d only fire him if Iran asked for it. But putting the offer on the table would not be out of line.Report
Something I wrote a while back.Report
I see it differently.
Even after I account for my knee-jerk (and perhaps not always admirable) sympathy for the cashier, I’m inclined to say that greater discretion implies, or ought to imply, a slightly more forgiving margin of error. One element involved in giving discretion is to lessen the cost of managing the employee, and that, in my view, suggests that the employer then is assuming the risk for some loss.
That doesn’t fully answer your point, I realize. Because there probably has to be some margin for error. (And I didn’t know about whatever the Fred Mayer thing was…..hadn’t even heard of Fred Mayer until just now.)Report
He apparently went to the Darth Vader School of Management in Coruscant.
Apology accepted Captain Needa.Report
I think we should make sure that our secret service agents are graceful in their movements and not clumsy. It might be safer that way.Report
The likelyhood of a distilled presidential daily brief item capturing exactly what happened in any particular place in the world (including NYC) is remote. (the telephone game)
The ability of an unnamed official to switch from the third to the first person when re-telling a story about an event where he (or she) wasn’t there is also telling.Report