“Cq, Cq” … My Last Transmission

By Samantha Sims

The working world of air traffic controllers is filled with extreme pressure and stress, and for women controllers, sexual harassment. It is an atmosphere author Samantha Sims was caught in during her more than twenty years as an air traffic controller at an air route traffic control center in Miami, Florida, from 1990 to 2014. In CQ, CQ My Last Transmission, she tells her story.

From her growing up years being bullied, to serving in the Navy, to her twenty-year career with the FAA, this memoir narrates Sims life story. She tells how she could no longer endure the pervasive abuse handed out by male controllers and how she decided to stand up to the bullies and blow the whistle about what was happening on the job.

CQ, CQ My Last Transmission discusses how Sims survived the toxic environment to get her story out in the open. When the nondisclosure clause was missing from her out-of-court settlement with the FAA, she forced the secrets to be divulged. She shares her journal so others still caught in the system can get the relief they deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504925419

Samantha Sims

Samantha Sims’ many accomplishments in life go on for pages. An overachiever that took on challenges with full confidence. She encountered her biggest obstacle when she became an Air Traffic Controller. She thought she was doing it the right way by going to the union when she was having difficulty with coworkers. As the harassment intensified, she was informed by a former facility union president, “You are never going to have a safe place to work because the union will always protect the harasser, and you definitely have a target on your back.” Samantha quickly learned that standing up for herself meant having to go it alone. Even after settling her EEOC case out of court with the FAA, she was physically and emotionally attack by her coworkers until she was ordered to work from home for the last year and nine months of her career until her forced retirement in 2014. In her story, Samantha Sims dramatically conveys the emotional stress one endures when they walk the path of a whistleblower.

Book preview

Chapter One

Wow! I don’t know where to begin? the male FAA Special Agent said to his female FAA Special Agent partner as he sat at the end of the table with his arms framing the seven-page statement I was just sworn-in to sign. To gain clarification I asked him, What do you mean? The FAA Special Agent said, I don’t know where to begin my investigation, the EEOC system that completely failed you, union in bed with management, or the misuse of authority by management itself.

Three days after speaking with the FAA Special Agents my Washington assigned liaison called me as he was on his way to a meeting in Washington, DC about one of the many things I had brought to light and said, Samantha, I am so sorry. We are finding out that you are not alone. We are finding out that what happened to you is ramped at all the facilities nationwide. My Washington assigned liaison went on, There are things I can tell you and things I can’t, but I can tell you there are major changes in procedures coming because of what happened to you. I thanked him and as I was hanging up the phone, hot tears began to roll down my face.

An article published by abcnews.go.com called Pushing Boundaries While ‘Pushing Tin’ by Jake Tapper and Avery Miller on February 16, 2006 at web address http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/US/story?id=1627193&page=1 highlights alleged rampant sexual harassment in the high-pressure, high-stress and very male environment. A female controller recalled walking through her facility was like walking a gauntlet of looks and comments creating an intimidating environment during her interview on 20/20 in 1994. On the same 20/20 show another female controller said, So I’m sitting there, working very heavy traffic, and all of a sudden I feel a hand -- not on my thigh, right in my crotch. Around February 10, 2006 at an airport a female controller fed up with a general culture of hostility and supervisors she deemed emotionally abusive quit her job.

It used to make me laugh every time I saw any FAA spokesperson on the TV say, Safety was never compromised. In 2002 three woman at an Air Traffic Control Center, filed complaints. All three women alleged after they complained the harassment got worse. According to an internal survey of women in the FAA in 2003 that number was 14 percent. The FAA stopped asking female employees if they had been sexually harassed in its 2005 survey.

The 2006 executive vice president of the union said, The problem is that, from the administrator on down, they’ve created an environment of employee intimidation and employee harassment. When the administrator says, ‘No matter what you do, there will be no consequences. We will defend your actions. We will condone it.’ And this creates that culture where those that would abuse women in the workplace have safe haven to do so. At the time of this interview in 2006 the air traffic controllers union was in the midst of heated renegotiations with the FAA and the union complained that the environment is the fault of supervisors and the organization. I feel the union left out of the interview how it was their job to protect their Bargaining Unit Employees (BUEs) from disciplinary action. Meaning the union dues paying harasser got full protection, whereas the harassed are left hanging out to dry if the local union representatives did not like you as stated in the article, …aviation experts caution that supervisors and the FAA management are not the only ones responsible -- that controllers in the union have also been a problem.

A female controller at an airport said she watched two controllers play a game of chicken with a pair of jetliners -- while a supervisor laughed. She tried to work within the FAA system just as I had. When her complaints were ignored, she went public just as I had too. Her allegations that near-misses were prevalent was vindicated by a special counsel investigation but she says at the time there was no investigation into the overall hostile work environment.

Another female controller complained to the EEOC about tampons scattered in her locker, job discrimination and a threatening letter containing obscene and sexist language. The EEOC ruled that she was subjected to sex-based harassment and that the incidents were sufficiently severe or pervasive to create a hostile work environment. In 2004, the EEOC ruled against the FAA, saying, The agency failed to prove that it took appropriate corrective action.

Another female controller was verbally abused by a male supervisor who was defended by the FAA, her family and friends said. In a phone conversation, her father recalled how bad it got for his daughter. It got so stressful, friends and family said, the woman her sister describes as very strong changed -- and eventually took her own life. The day that she took it, she’d had an extremely stressful night at work, her father said. They had a meeting in the morning and they did not seem to give her any backup at all in what had happened. And she walked off the job, and that was the last anyone ever talked to her. Posthumously the EEOC found in her favor and against the FAA. The FAA said that supervisor was disciplined and moved to a non-supervisory job while he continues to work for the FAA. At the conclusion of this article, the FAA said they have instituted new programs to eliminate such problems. This article was printed in 2006, and here we are in 2015 with pretty much the same.

Let us look at the union praised whistleblower, if the union officials had really wanted to protect her, she would not have had to leave the FAA with a damaged career suing the FAA in civilian court for almost one million dollars.

Then look at the woman that won here EEOC case post-mortem, having committed suicide from the mental terrorism she was enduring. Her case information reads as such; Gender Discrimination: Harassment. Complainant, an Air Traffic Controller (ATC) alleged discriminatory harassment, including a suspension, based on sex (female). The Commission found that the AJ’s findings of fact were supported by substantial evidence, which demonstrated that complainant’s supervisor exhibited gender bias. There was testimonial evidence from other air traffic controllers that the supervisor made derogatory comments about complainant and other female ATC’s, and referred to complainant in sexist terms. The agency was ordered to provide back pay, restore leave usage, and pay attorney’s fees to the Estate (September 21, 2005).

A former union national president was being sued for slander because in his blog he mentioned the supervisor in an unflattering light. The union voted and agreed to pay for some of his legal fees to fight the slander suit. I told the FAA Special Agents that I had to go see at a FAA Headquarters October 29 – November 1, 2012; I blame the union at least 70% for my situation. I was paying dues and they were fighting harder to protect the harassers than they were fighting to protect me.

I won my EEOC case in an out of court settlement on June 10, 2011. I had to withdraw my claim to get some of what I wanted for restitution. The FAA agreed to my promotion to a Staff Specialist until my mandatory retirement on September 30, 2014. When I returned to work on June 13, 2011, I was handed a memo stating, Granted assignment to a Staff Specialist for 45 days only. At which time I will be ordered back to the control room and will have to take Annual Leave, Sick Leave, or Leave Without Pay if I have not obtained my medical clearance to return to controlling airplanes by then.

When I informed the Manager on June 13, 2011 about the agreement made the Friday before he said, I don’t know anything about that. That was the routine response I got from every manager at the Center every time I mentioned my case in any way, shape, or form. I believe their goal here was to cause me more stress by dragging out the execution of the settlement. At the same time telling me at work they have not received official notification on my new assignment and I was going on forced leave after the approved 45 days extra duty expired.

They placed me in the corner cubicle right next to two manager’s office doors with a young man in the cubicle in front of me that had spent time in the Marines. It felt like he was my bodyguard. I am sure they all were quite nervous; I was. I was so quiet at my desk the Marine would literally walk back to my cubicle to check on me. My first week back was full of drama. They dumped my FAA email password a couple of times each day which meant I couldn’t log into my computer and was having to spin my wheels on the phone a couple of times a day with the FAA IT people to reinstate my password. The computer I had to use when I could log in would not allow me to get to my AOL email and it forced me to have to go downstairs to the rooms that were set up for us to use on our breaks to surf the internet with. During one of those trips I ended up in a room with a woman I have worked with for all the years I had been at the Air Route Traffic Control Center, but only since 2005 had actually spoken with on occasion because we were in different areas with different days off. She had been at the racetrack when I was there participating in a SportBikeTrackTime.com track day event on my 2005 CBR600RR. She was there watching her husbands’ cousin ride. We began to talk about my current situation. She said, I hated you for airing our dirty laundry. I told her about just a few of the things that forced me to go along with my lawyers request to do the interviews. She said, I’m not mad at you anymore, but be prepared that the day you retire for people to tell you to go fuck yourself.

I was an Air Traffic Controller from 1990 to 2014. The facility has approximately 400 controllers and all the support personnel to run everything else. Every air traffic controller has their own unique set of initials to identify themselves on the recorded landlines when coordinating air traffic information and mine were CQ. There are over twenty of these facilities in the US Airspace System almost exactly alike to oversee the National Air Space (NAS). When I would tell people, I am an air traffic controller they would sometimes respond, Oh, you’re the one at the airport with the orange batons guiding the airplane up to the gate. I always laughed and said, No, here is your air traffic lesson of the day. The towers’ you see at the airport work you on and off the ground. The airspace they work looks like an upside down wedding cake. As you are about to leave the Tower’s airspace they hand you off to us at the Center. Then the Center controllers keep you separated from everyone else flying from A to B already. Everyone knows that the airlines HUB their flights; meaning they schedule arrivals and departures at the same time. That is why the Center job is slightly more stressful then the Tower’s job. This is true with the smaller airports, but in my early days as a controller in training, we went to an Executive Airport for a tour of the operation to allow us to see what they do in conjunction to what we will be doing. On this day there was just one woman in the glass windowed tower working. It really did not seem to be very busy which is probably why we went there and not to the area’s main airport, because we were a large group not just a few people. Not long after we arrived and introduced ourselves the woman controller was clearing a small plane for take-off when a primarily non-English speaking pilot in a helicopter asked for permission to cross over the top of the airport. The controller clearly told the helicopter pilot permission granted to cross after the small airplane had departed. As I watched out the tower cab windows I can see the helicopter flying parallel to the right of the runway, flying in the same direction, as the small plane is making his departure roll down the runway. As the small plane actually lifted off the ground the helicopter cuts hard left to cross over the top of the runway on a direct path with the departing aircraft. I remember the feeling of dread that overwhelmed me as the rush of adrenaline engulfed my body as the level of anxiety in me rose. Had the small plane not reacted as quickly as he had by going to full power putting the nose of the airplane almost straight up the two aircraft would have collided. I watched as the helicopter passed right next to the wheels of the aircraft as the controller got immediately on the radio with the helicopter pilot and very sternly advised him of his mistake. Then she very calmly thanked the pilot of the small plane for being so quick to act as we watched the small plane take a nosedive to regain the lift under its wings it needed to stay in the air and continue on its way. It was on this day that I decided I did not want to work at an airport. I will be quite happy looking at my little green blips on the radar screen and keeping them five miles and a thousand feet apart. When I am working your flight as you depart, I have to keep you separated from all the other flights that are taking off along with the airplanes that are already under my control. The Center’s airspace is broken up into sectors with their own frequencies. The sectors grouped into separate Areas assigned a set group of controllers that are required to keep currency on those sectors. To keep the flow of traffic safer there are airways set up all through the airspace for routine flight paths. My job gets stressful as you and everyone flying is approaching your destinations at the same time. I have to take all the different types of airplanes and get them descended and slowed and in trail before I hand them off to the Approach Control that is responsible for your destination airport. So technically I’m responsible for the start of that nicely spaced out line of airplanes you see coming in for their landing at the airports.

The following is a very condensed replay of my world. I start with the things from my childhood that I feel are pertinent to my story leading up to a journal like replay of the last few years in the FAA. The main reason for this book is for the people who have supported me and have been a positive influence in my world to get the full picture so to speak. And for the ones still in the FAA enduring this exact situation to see what to do and to learn from my mistakes and missteps’ to help them get to a better quality of life.

Just a note to the FAA Special Agents. I was not informed what I was being sent to Headquarters’ for when I came to meet you two, so you can use this to supplement the statement I gave you because this book comes directly from my journals, paperwork, notes, and calendars I kept over the years whereas what I gave you was only from memory, not Memorex. This is not everything, publisher requested to keep it brief for readability and to change the names of the players for liable reasons.

Chapter Two

I am a silly girl with silly dreams. I wanted to marry Speed Racer. I wanted a husband, a couple of kids, a house in a wonderful neighborhood where we had our friends over with their kids having backyard BBQ’s with Sunday Football on the TV while watching our kids grow up together as a great big happy group.

My father raised me to be furiously independent. I would be sent off to face what the world was going to hand me with my father’s words ringing in my head, Go get ’em Tiger, as he would pat the back of my head as I ran along to do my mischief.

I was one of five white kids in elementary school as I can remember it. The saddest memory is having a white fur hat with matching fur pompoms at the end of the tie strings in a tabby color mix stolen from me I had just gotten for Christmas when I was about 7 years old. I was in the school bathroom at the end of the school day sitting on the toilet as I watched someone reach over the top of the door and grab my hat. Poof! As quick as that my hat was gone. From that day on, I never put anything over the top of the door that I do not want taken away from me.

My mom has a picture of me wearing the hat sitting in a tree at the house we rented from 1965-1971. Our neighbors next to us on the corner were Bill and Amanda Jones. He was a bus driver and she was a stay-at-home wife, they never had children of their own. What an incredibly funny man Bill was. Bill was meticulous about his yard. After standing and admiring the days effort put into making his yard look beautiful, my father snuck a dandelion flower in the yard a couple of feet from the sidewalk that led straight to the street. My father decided to never pull pranks on Bill again, at least not with his yard; they thought he was going to have a heart attack when he yelled, Where the hell did that weed come from?!? when later in the day they were all sitting on Bill’s front porch when he first saw the pretty yellow flower.

My father flew my best friend Linda Tedescucci Hopkins in for my 15th birthday in 1979. We took Linda to meet Bill and Amanda Jones. That was the last time I ever saw them. Bill got the giggles from telling Linda the story about the snake and me. My mother has a green thumb and I can end the life of a plastic plant. Being in the yard with mom doing her gardening I became comfortable with bugs and worms. If a critter crossed my path, I would give them a chance or two to move on, if they continue to pester me and they can inflict pain via a bite or sting; I will kill them. Bill tells his version of the tale like this to Linda, Samantha was playing in the backyard. She always loved being up in that tree. She would just sit up there for hours watching the world go by. She saw something move on the ground and yells out as she is climbing down, Big worm Bill! Big worm! I look over to where she is pointing and it’s a small snake she is all excited about. I yell over as I am trying to get there first, No Samantha! Snake, that’s not a worm. She kept yelling, Big worm Bill, big worm, just as excited as can be because I knew she wanted to pick it up and play with it. I get to the hedge just as she does out of breath I say, No Big Worm. Snake, Samantha! She gets a sad face as she kneels down near it saying, No big worm?

If you have ever seen an arrow with a real razor edged tip you will understand my dad going ballistic over the boys who lived in the house behind ours. Dad says I was on the swing set partially blocked by the garage back by mom’s garden when he saw an arrow come flying across the fence. After escorted by the police to and from their front door where I am sure a threat was made, my father placed that arrow on top of the refrigerator. I remember just standing there staring up at it thinking how pretty the metal tip was with its edging and cut out work, and how sharp those two edges were.

One day the plumber had to come unclog the drain in the middle of the laundry/washroom floor at the back of the house where I would put the remainder of my bologna sandwiches when I did not want to finish them. My brother had a smirk on his face probably thinking, You’re busted now, with me looking back trying to keep an I’m not scared! face, but I was nervous. The plumber ran his snake down the drain and discovered it blocked by something. When all that came up were the wooden blocks my brother had dropped down there trying to get me caught, I stuck my tongue out at him after making sure no one was looking.

My father went from pumping gas and hustling pool for money to buy my diapers with, to becoming a self-taught draftsman/engineer. He took a drafting job in the middle of my second grade year requiring us to move. I remember the second grade teacher being very nice. She made tapes for me to listen to, to help me read and say words correctly. The teacher was going over words with the class one day. She would write a word on the chalkboard and then call on a student to use it in a sentence. The teacher writes W O R D on the chalkboard. I am trying to sound it out, for the life of me I cannot figure out what the word is. Then terror sets in as a panic attack ensues because I see her looking at me. The teacher calls my name. I freeze, she says, Go ahead Samantha, use it in a sentence. I take a deep breath and prepare for the forth-coming humiliation as I reply, I don’t know what that word is? The teacher must have put together the face, the sound of my words, and the actual sentence I used. She quickly figured out I really meant I had no clue to what that word was. The teacher quickly responded with a very good and tried to move on when dummy me, pipes back up, I don’t know what that word is? The teacher again puts her hands up as she said, Yes, Samantha. That’s very good usage of that word. Then the light bulb comes on. I saw the teacher light up with a smile as I realize what just happened. The word was WORD!

I had a mischief streak about me then. I went to the restroom during class one day. Noticing that the sink handles were not spring loaded to turn off automatically unless you were holding them like in my prior school I decided to stuff all the sink drains with paper towels and turn on all the spigots as I went back to class. Since I was the only one that went to the restroom during class that hour, they knew it was I. I admit, not a bright idea at the time. I remember sitting in the principal’s waiting room in a big leather chair outside the office door when my mom came out of the meeting and took me home for the rest of the day. Not another word was said about that day. I am sure my mom did not tell my dad or I would have at least been grounded. I remember the boy that lived across the street getting mad at me one day and hitting me in the middle of my back with a crochet mallet. It hurt so bad I dropped to my knees in the middle of the street. I am sure I never talked to him again after that. If I was a cat I was using up my nine lives at an early age.

At the end of second grade, we moved to a mid-west city. This is where I really began to feel the effects of bullies. We lived on the edge of the rich part of town. You knew you were on the poor side of town because you still had telephone poles in your yard. Aside from the money thing, I never could figure out why the other children picked on me. Not just the normal teasing in the lunch line that I was still flat chested in the sixth grade. However, hurtful stuff, like trying to rip my clothes off behind the bushes at the school after just coming to my house claiming to be my friend and wanting to hang out across the street at the school playground as Kevin and Mike had done.

They say things happen for a reason. I just want to know what I did in a former life that makes this one have to be so NOT BORING! I remember Kevin staying in at recess with Cindy to work on classroom decorations. Kevin never volunteered for anything. I knew something was up as I looked at him smiling back at me as I walked out the door with the rest of the class to go out to the playground. I did not enjoy recess knowing Kevin was in there practically alone and up to something. This was the first time I learned to trust those feelings. When the class had returned from recess and was beginning a new assignment Tammy freaked out when she opened her desk and discovered her check for skating lessons after school with the Girl Scout Troop was missing. I looked over at Kevin instantly and he was sitting proud and tall at his desk smiling as if he was just so proud of himself. See, Kevin was one of those boys who tried to rip off my clothes and I never told anyone because I thought I was the one who did something wrong. The teacher asked everyone to open their desk and I was not surprised to see the check sitting right there on top of the supplies in my desk. Now I am wondering, Did Cindy know too? With all the mayhem of Tammy crying that her mother was not going to understand and will be furious, I got rid of that check. I took it in my hand and very carefully made as if I was leaning back and slid that check into the boy’s desk behind me. Again, the teacher insisted we all check our desk one more time. How surprised Kevin looked when it was found; not in my desk. I returned his shocked look with a smile that said, You missed!

Cindy was the girl I let win the Intermural Sports Tournament. She knows I let her win too. I was tired of all the meanness the other girls inflicted on me throughout the intermural program because up to that game with Cindy I was undefeated. Verbally tormented in the girls’ locker room where the girls knew no one else was around to hear nor monitored by the teacher. I let them win; I let them get to me. I even used my bad knees to get me out of gym class all together after that.

I endured a lot of bullying and meanness from 3rd grade to 7th grade. I know now that it was not my fault. During this time, I remember admiring Shirley Muldowney, Evil Knievel, Gloria Steinem, Emerson Fittipaldi, and Speed Racer. I knew Speed Racer was not real but I was going to grow up to marry him one day. Silly girl with silly dreams; instead I grew up to be Speed Racerette.

I feel that one of the reasons for my social awkwardness was because I spent my time training, by my dad and professional coaches, to be a Professional Bowler. I have always been naturally athletic, but I was doing something that kept me out of the social realm of the kids I was supposed to grow up with. I, instead, became familiar with the environment of the adult scene bowling leagues hanging out with my dad.

I did not grow up to become the Professional Bowler my father hoped for, I did have the talent just not the drive to push on. Dad had me practice at a bowling alley across town where two women from the WPBA hung out. I remember seeing them standing there on the concourse talking with my father watching me. I must have had a good rhythm going with light oil on the lane because dad said I was throwing thunder and the pocket would just explode on every ball. One of the woman asked my father how old I was, 16, he said. The two woman looked at each other as if I was going to be a force to reckon with when I hit the tour.

They did not have anything to fear. Distracted by boys and the small thing of never really being able to bowl for fun. Dad came home one day after I had graduated high school saying as he took his position in his leather recliner at the end of the workday, Don’t think you’re living here past 21, when it was clear I had stopped bowling.

I was always very interested in cars and racing. I did not learn until a few years ago that my father was the 1963 Automatic Competition Stock Drag Racing Champion of Missouri in a 1958 Edsel. I was born in 1964. We can all pretty much figure out what put the end to the racing career. It is not cheap, even if you know how to fix a car. My father said he showed up with the Edsel and they all laughed at him and the car. Dad said their laughter made him so mad he spent every penny he had to build up the car to win that championship. Poor Edsel, we kept that car until we moved in 1976. The Edsel sold to a person that I think used it in a derby, yeap, the smash your car up type derby.

My interest in cars at this time only openly praised by the Auto Shop Teacher in high school. I was the first girl to take auto shop and it did not go over well. I was invading the boy’s realm. The boys in my class copied my work assignments, but someone wrote Rag in my yearbook when we passed them around at the end of the year. My senior year auto shop class was to be a 2-hour hands on auto tech class that I would have loved, but I was afraid to take it. I could feel the boys’ disapproval of the idea of me being in that class when the teacher discussed it. The shop teacher said he would look out for me, but I did not want something bad to happen to others or me. I really did believe they would sabotage things in the garage that could get people hurt, mainly me.

Not sure, what his motive was but dad took apart the top of the Edsel engine and laid all the parts out on a sheet under the carport. No one touched it for a week. One day I was bored; I did not have the boy up the street trying to run me over with his bicycle because I would run away allowing him to chase me, and not for fun. One day I decided not to run anymore and just stopped dead in my tracks. I couldn’t stop laughing when the boy went end over end trying not to hit me, Why did you stop!?! he yelled at me from the ground. Because I’m not running from you anymore, as I walked into my house feeling proud.

I started putting together the carburetor. At dinner that night dad asked, Who played with the parts? I thought a grounding was coming when I said, Me. Not a word said, Dad put the car back together alone and all I knew was he had a trophy in the living room with a car on top. If anyone still has the Hot Rod Magazine from the summer of 1963, I would love to see the article about dad and the Edsel.

The racing bug has always been inside me. I would get up early to watch racing on the weekend while everyone slept in unless dad was doing his bills listening to the same Slim Whitman 8-track tape repeatedly. Imagine the laughter that came out of me at the theater when that was the exact album music that killed the aliens in the movie Mars Attacks! Dad always watched drag racing. It was like church on Sunday to him. I remember watching Shirley Muldowney and thinking, Wow, a woman winning in a man’s world! Then the feminist movement was taking flight and I was a huge fan of Gloria Steinem. People who admire her who have not walked that life have no idea what that woman risked to speak out. Kudos to you Gloria! I experienced real fear and hers’ had to be on a much grander level than what I felt, but either way it was real fear I felt fighting the FAA and my union.

Chapter Three

I remember vividly crying myself to sleep at night thinking I would be okay with not waking up in the morning from all the bullying at school I was enduring. I did not want to spend one more day with those mean kids. I eventually began telling myself that I just had to hold it together until I graduate and I will never have to be around those mean people again. As I grew older and hopefully a little wiser, I turned my fear and loneliness into a focused anger that I was going to make this a better world for all the women in it. I told my son when he started school, Do not ever pick on someone because they are different, weird, or whatever. I do not ever want to hear about you badmouthing or being part of a group picking on anyone. If your friends start it and you do not want to ask them to stop for fear of them attacking you, you just walk away. And the bad kids that live in the neighborhood; always be nice towards them, but keep on walking. When he came home from school the day of the Columbine incident he asked me, Mom, is today why you always told me to never pick on anyone at school? My son said, There is a quiet kid at school that always wears gothic clothes and they ordered him today to never wear that stuff to school again. I didn’t think that was right. It’s not, I said, but that is the knee jerk reaction of the world. Let’s not worry about what got us here, let’s just go after what looks the same.

After what I endured I decided I was not going to let my child live with the same harassment. You cannot protect them from everything, but I gave it one hell of a fight. One day when I was picking up the boys after school from Middle School, my son got into the car and he was very quiet. I made him look at me; he had a welt the size of a quarter less than an inch below his right eye. Aaron instantly piped up from the back seat, There’s a kid by the bridge popping people with a rubber band. I left the car running, told the two boys, Keep put, keep the doors locked, and I’ll be right back. I had my son take me to where this happened and there he was, still there! I walked up and asked, Why did you hit my son in the face with that rubber band? He walked into it. I didn’t hit him, the arrogant little punk replied. I said, You have two choices. One, go with me to the school and we tell the office what you were doing, or two you refuse to go to the office and I call the police and file an assault charge against you. Yeah, you are probably going to get off with a slap on the wrist by the courts, but I am going to make your parents’ life hell for a little while. Your choice, what are we going to doing?

I could see my son was freaking out, probably thinking, Oh God Mom, you’re going to get my ass beat to a pulp tomorrow for this… As we were about to turn the corner to the front of the school I turned on a dime and was now about six inches from the kids face and said, As of right now this is no longer between you and my son; this is now between you and me for hurting my child. Even if you go to the office, if I hear of any retaliation I am going to be all over your world like a bad dream. Do you understand? The kid just nodded his head yes. The office said, We can’t do anything because it didn’t happen on school grounds. I was between midnight shifts as an air traffic controller and my fuse was short. I said, Let me get this straight. I’m teaching my child to be accountable for his actions, but what you’re telling him here today is if he does it across some line no one cares? They finally agreed to call the parents. Thank you; the rubber band only missed my child’s eyeball by an inch! Moreover, it was one of those super-duper ones, half inch wide and six inches long.

The next day my son came home with a smile. Believe me when I say I was waiting for the phone to ring all day. You know Mom, after what you did yesterday I thought I was going to be dead meat at school today; but that kid told all his friends, You know that kid, don’t touch him, his Mom is physco. We both laughed, and me, more a sigh of relief.

I am not perfect, but I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until you really cross me. My son had cracked his elbow and we were at the doctors’ office for the first visit after the Emergency Room visit to get his cast put on. While I was at the counter filling out the paperwork they always ask for on the first visit, an older man comes up to the receptionist to complain about the wait. The pleasant young woman tells him, Sir, I’m sorry for the wait, but we have a lot of ER follow-up appointments today. If you’d like to reschedule I’d be happy to do that if you can’t wait any longer today? He proceeds to belittle this young woman with his tone and displeasure. I cut in and said, Sir, she said if you can’t wait any longer she would be glad to reschedule your appointment. I’m sorry my son’s broken arm is interfering with your visit. You need to mind your own business, what concern of this is yours, the elder man said. It is totally my concern. If I let you continue being rude and disrespectful to this young woman I am letting my son think this is acceptable behavior. So, I think you should reschedule your appointment or have a seat and wait like the rest of us, I replied. He did some kind of, Well, I never…, snorted and walked back to his seat. He and an elder woman began to make comments about the nerve of me. In the meantime, the receptionist looked at me and whispered, Thank you. A very short time later our name was called and we went into our assigned exam room to wait