Dear Steemians,
I joined Steemit yesterday, I had no concept of just how many articles about cryptocurrency could exist in one place so I'm enjoying that. I've dabbled in Ethereum in the past - it acted as a gateway crypto into the darker stuff that exists in the far corners of bittrex, where I made it my mission to lose money on every alt coin possible until I eventually washed up on the kinder shores of Steemit.
I left the London Metropolitan police force a few months ago as a Detective, after 8 years service. After careful consideration on how to appropriately announce my departure, I did so with an account which explained the impact food, and the lack thereof, had on my career. I'm sharing that account with you all today, and am envisioning Steemit as a venue for me to declaim all the slightly odd things I've got up to over the years. Questions welcomed! I'm sorry I haven't got a photo of me with some cardboard but I've only just realised it's a thing and I'm in bed now and that seems like an impossible amount of effort required at this stage. Next post I'll go nuts with a marker pen. FYI the below account involves some fairly hardcore and impenetrable british humour so brace yourselves:
I joined for a laugh 8 years ago and it's my last day in policing tomorrow.
Seven years and six months ago I was wandering down Oxford Street in a silly hat learning how to direct people towards Primark in eighteen languages. By the seven year point I'd gotten used to inspiring an involuntary feeling of guilt in everyone I walked past who had done nothing wrong, and a feeling of aggrieved persecution in everyone I approached who had done something wrong.
Being relatively posh I assumed I’d be one of those polished liberal arts graduates who get rapidly over promoted, repeatedly uses phrases like ‘going forward’ and ‘touch base’ and is universally despised. I was fine with that, and eagerly anticipated my effortless rise.
The Met in its wisdom however, saw the potential for me to follow in its finest tradition and become a world weary, embittered wreck of a clichéd detective with a crumpled shirt and a bottle of whiskey in the desk drawer and it did its best to make that happen.
The rot probably first set in due to my appetite. Patrolling several miles a day on foot is hungry work and stopping anywhere to eat is both boring on single patrol and inevitably leads to snippy remarks about 'taxpayers money' from the kind of awful person who genuinely believes Daily Mail headlines. The need to refuel on the go led to me routinely stashing a packet of marshmallows in the lining of my helmet for a surreptitious snack. Hat marshmallows are the real reason no policeman will let you wee in his helmet, regardless of the uniquely wacky and fun Hen do you and the girls from Provincial Town are on.
Helmet food reached a glorious peak when, with regret, I had to refuse several direct orders to put my hat on from an increasingly irate sergeant. I calmed the situation by announcing that I was unable to comply due to its current use as a receptacle for my recently purchased bacon sandwiches, before strolling away with bare head held high.
The job cleverly solved the hat issue by transferring me to a plain clothes team which targeted robbers and dealers and almost never wore helmets. It had a certain slightly intimidating reputation for macho behaviour but I managed to impress my new colleagues through my deployment of pocket ham. I was trying to cut down on carbs and increase my intake of portable protein and so would rarely go anywhere without a pack of wafer sliced finest honey roast about my person, which I would slither out of my pocket and discretely chew on during moments of tension. This kind of behaviour reassured my colleagues that I was indeed odd enough to be a proper copper. I can only imagine senior officers also noted this behaviour, disapproved and thought a spell in Tottenham would have a bracing effect.
In Tottenham my patrol base still had scorch marks on the walls from some enthusiastic fire bombing in the recent riots. On my first day there the first man I ambled up to and asked what he was doing turned out to be loading his car boot with 10 kilos of vacuum packed cannabis, a fact which when combined with my Received Pronunciation, convinced the local management to give me a battlefield promotion. Temporary Sergeant status gave me access to a range of vehicles, fridges and almost any kind of food I could wish for. I therefore ate nothing but tuna and rice for 18 months in an attempt to cultivate a reputation for solid respectability but the damage was already done and substantive promotion was not forthcoming - it slowly dawned on me that I was going to have to do things the hard way.
I went off to Hounslow and became a detective, where I will draw a veil over proceedings to ensure you buy my memoirs in full once I've finished making up slanderous details. Suffice to say I decided five weeks ago that I hadn't had enough recognition for my hard work and that I was going to storm off in a huff. At precisely that point, with an impressive sense of awkward timing, the Met promoted me to Detective Sergeant, gave me a commendation and told me my squad has been shortlisted for the Met's 'Team of the year' prize at the Excellence in Policing awards, thus rendering any carefully nursed grievances effectively void.
I'm still leaving, because I'd already thrown my toys out of the pram, the pension is a shadow of its former self and I'm looking forward to my next career. I'm not sure if public servants are supposed or encouraged to have fun, but I have, every damn day, although probably because what I constitute as fun is weird. Yes I'm leaving but I'm proud of every minute. And all of the ham.