Power Corrupts
By Dan
What do you think happens when a trainer is given the following?
- The duty to train you to pass certification exams.
- The power to test you on whether you and they succeeded.
- The control over your company receiving a quarter million dollar Good Maintenance Discount based on your “success”.
- An incentive to hold onto that money for their company.
- A desire to retaliate against anyone who would question the legitimacy of this arrangement.
- An opportunity to retaliate by marking your success as a failure and broadcasting your supposed failure to your entire management team if they don’t like being questioned.
Does this sound unlikely?
It very well could be unlikely. Why?
- The employee seeking certification could be making excuses for failing.
- The employee could be blame-casting, a rather cowardly act shucking responsibility.
- The employee might not be committed enough to study the material and not want to be held accountable for that.
- Who better to test for certification than the company who produced the software?
- Why would a company compromise its integrity and risk looking unethical to its customers?
- Why would a company risk a defamation lawsuit if an employee is fired for failing an exam and they cannot or will not provide the evidence to substantiate their claim that the employee failed?
What Makes This Corruption More Likely?
- When the company testing the candidate has promised $250,000/year in Good Maintenance Discounts to customers who have a fully certified staff.
- When the customer has only one certification left to obtain this discount.
- When the company testing the candidate wants to keep the customer’s management in fear of questioning or doing anything that might cause them to lose that $250,000 discount if it is offered while they are actively pursuing certification.
- When the company changes the rules to limit the number of attempts for a candidate who is on the verge of completing the last of several requirements.
- When that candidate keeps failing the exam about one question short of passing and yet cannot see the proof and has reason to believe they should have achieved a perfect or near-perfect score.
- When the candidate has a history of perfect exams in other situations regardless of the difficulty.
- When the candidate was terrified even to achieve a low or mid-passing score let alone one failed exam.
- When the company refuses and makes excuses when asked to produce evidence of failure.
- When a candidate faces this abuse, this slander, this torment before his management repeatedly and courageously and faces contempt and blame unjustly giving the benefit of the doubt until all attempts and possibilities of achieving certification are unfairly and dishonestly exhausted and the company still won’t produce evidence to support their defaming claim to the employee’s management that the employee failed.
- When that employee is fired and continues to fight it for years in a public way subjecting himself to further criticism and shame rather than giving up for other job opportunities.
- When that employee prays to God for His infinite wrath to fall upon every lie, every injustice and to be held to the same standard for his own integrity in this and all other matters.
Then it should be obvious to anyone with a brain who is honest and who is a lying coward.
Epic?
Community Medical Centers' leadership in Fresno, California?
What say you? Will you be truthful and just?
Or will you make excuses, ostracize, and remain silent like a bunch of cowardly arrogant jackasses who are not man or woman enough to accept accountability for making things right?
It has been seven years now. I think it is clear where you stand.
Hopefully, you will enjoy this time on earth, and it will be the last time you will have any joy to remember and wish you could return to in all your eternity in hell.
Or maybe, better yet, you will have a change of heart and want to do your part to restore justice.
So far, all I’ve seen is you pretending to be religious, Catholic or whatever.
Forgiveness?
Should I forgive? A couple of friends at CRMC said I should forgive, and I appreciate that advice. It is generally good advice. But I have a couple of questions about that:
- Which is holier: a) unconditional forgiveness or b) conditional forgiveness?
- Does God forgive unconditionally or conditionally?
- Does God require that we repent? Is that a condition?
- Does God require us to forgive others if we would be forgiven? Is that a condition?
- Does God require that we forgive unconditionally or conditionally?
- Does God require us to have forgiveness more holy than His?
- Or is all true forgiveness conditional by nature, requiring repentance for it to have meaning?
If this is all just an excuse not to forgive, then how would that not also indict God of the same thing and even indict Him of hypocrisy? If there is a flaw in the logic, an element that destroys this line of questioning, what might that be? That God is perfect and therefore has a unique right not to forgive when unforgiveness is supposedly less holy than forgiveness?
If I want to forgive but cannot because those who have wronged me and wronged others have not made good on their duty to repent, then how does that not indict God who, though He paid the ultimate price to forgive us, still cannot forgive us if we do not repent?
The issue is not God’s unwillingness to forgive. And although I am a mere man, if God cannot forgive those who do not repent, then what right or ability can I muster to bring forgiveness to those who not even God can forgive?
The issue is not my lack of desire to forgive.
Another reason for forgiveness is nothing more than an empty-headed expression of exasperation as if choosing to endure for years and years packed full of cowardice and arrogance on the part of those who were unjust is somehow a reason to forgive or forget after all this time has passed.
Has God forgotten? On Judgment Day, will you just say, “Oh my goodness! Get over it already”? I imagine God might rightly throw them into the lake of fire and say, “There. I’m over it. Bye.” But personally, I think it would end up being much more horrifying than that if God is just and holy.
Really. I’m just a man. And for them to ignore me is no big deal. I am not “dangerous” other than I don’t shut up or remain silent, and I am not intimidated easily or frightened away from speaking the truth.
My Response to Narcissism, Cowardice, and Dishonesty
I was accused to the court of owning guns and threatening to use them. I was accused of battering, assaulting, or stalking. And I never did any of those things. Ten people in leadership at CRMC apparently lied if they actually signed the paperwork to the court that was served to me. And yet I never saw any of them in person since the day I left CMC. Nor did I desire to see them.
Is it possible for ten in leadership at CMC to lie and for me to be telling the truth?
Ask yourself whether you will believe what’s convenient for you to believe, or whether you will question and be honest with yourself. Because what you say will not alter the truth, and the truth is that they lied. All ten of them. That is unless someone forged their signature on the papers delivered to me. And if that is the case, I hope they would step forward and say, “No–I did not say or sign that paper.” Furthermore, I would hope and pray they would not be punished by CMC for doing the right thing, the ethical thing, the just and honest thing.
Right now, it looks a lot to me like they have no real integrity, no real morals, no real ethics. And the same goes for those who back or defend these people in leadership. I know what I saw and experienced. And it was anything but justice and integrity. It was cowardice.
About Guns
I never owned guns until June 2021 when my father passed away leaving his grandfather’s two antique guns to us along with a B-B gun. I certainly never threatened to use a gun. Nor did I ever threaten to do anything illegal or unjust, though I did pray angry prayers for justice.
Ten people in leadership at CMC lied to the court about me and took my words out of context and slandered me. In an honest, intelligent, just, and sane court, I should have had no problem pressing charges of perjury against some in leadership at CRMC as I had in my hands a green folder served to me at the door of my house with some pretty ludicrous accusations. Stupid accusations. However, my heart palpitations were heavier at that time due to stress and it was not worthwhile to fight this matter in court though initially I fully intended to do so, and today, I probably would.
The only danger these ten people in leadership experienced was the danger of my telling the truth in a very public way. The only danger the rest of the company experienced is that the court would have the common sense, the ethics, the intelligence, the competence to respect my First Amendment right to tell the truth.
Playing the Victim?
Had CMC leadership not behaved like narcissists or cowards, someone might have stepped forward to say this whole situation is not right. After all, it has been over seven years. You would think that if it’s long enough for someone to say anything like, “Get over it already”, somebody would have the common sense to say to those ten in leadership, “Grow up. Take responsibility and make things right.”
Am I playing the victim here? Some might even reply, “Ya think?” This should be obvious. Right?
Baloney.
I have better reasons for persevering.
- I could just write them off and say they are not worth the time.
- I could say my coworkers are not worth the time because they remained with the company regardless of how leadership treated me and others.
- I could say they don’t matter as people might have to kiss up to leadership to keep their jobs or to climb the corporate ladder, and that makes it a form of prostitution.
But people also need to feed their families, and sometimes it is wise not to let scoundrels in leadership rob you of your right to earn a living.
For me, it hurt to be rejected. But then I came to feel it would be better to be rejected by a jerk or a bully or a hypocrite or a coward or a liar than to be accepted by one.
Joy in the End
So I’m no longer a victim. I was free to care for my family–especially my father during his last, feeble, seven years of life. Free. A couple of years later, I was free to retire with Social Security. When my father passed away, we were sad but we still had a guaranteed basic Social Security income and a house from the family trust. We replaced the roof and windows, insulation, and rain gutters and dressed up the garden.
And during this time, L was free to study skills worth developing. Web skills. DevOps. Machine Learning. Mobile development. And I don’t need a job. I can take on clients when and if I wish. Or not. I completed certifications much more substantial than Epic’s limited value certifications.
And those certifications completely vindicated me after I “supposedly” failed the last CSM exam. I completed courses and exams much more rigorous from Stanford professor Andrew Ng in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, with perfect scores throughout. I am about to do this two more times and am on the way to completing a course with perfect scores throughout from Geoffrey Hinton–a course that PhD students find very challenging. And I want to say I am about to start an AI Bootcamp through Caltech, but I have already completed some certifications of the non-live online courses in that boot camp hoping to complete it and complete all of the available projects rather than just enough to pass certification. It’s a seven to twelve-month boot camp.
So, am I a victim? I have so many projects that I have created. And I am having as much fun with those as my wife is with her photography and gardening. And there is a good chance that when I get these skills mastered, which will be very, very soon, I will have much to show for it and will likely be able to earn a very substantial income whether the leadership at CRMC likes it or not.