Remember we warned you about

How you need to watch/cover your ass because if they blame you for screwing a citizen's life, it could screw your career?

We were thinking about, but forgot to mention in our 2-page dissertation, the fact that it's not only your career at risk - it's your financial well-being, too. And we don't mean standing broke in the unemployment line, although some of the people who collect unemployment seem to live more lavishly than our working-daily asses do.

We mean lawsuit. The two PCO IIs under investigation have been named in at least one lawsuit. If the city fires them (we hope the city won't, but we know the city), it's the city's way of saying:

They fucked up on their own. We set rules/guidelines, they didn't follow them, and we did what we had to do on our end. We've washed our hands of those horrible wrong-doers...go after them.

Whether we like to think about/admit it or not, and whether or not other people like to give us credit for it (Read: the PO who posted a comment about how the most stress we deal with is when relief is late, for example)? We hold people's lives in our hands. And if something goes wrong, it's not human nature to admit one's own fault.

It's human nature to blame all of the 10-year-old-fighting-me, boyfriend-kicking-my-ass-after-I-let-him-back-after-the-15th-time-he-kicked-my-ass, we-let-our-neighborhood-go-to-shit-because-we-didn't-raise-our-kids-right bullshit on someone else.

And that "someone else," our faithful coworkers, would include you and us.