Living with Diabetes and Lapband

For the longest time, I didn't post ANY thing that wasn't diabetes related. I even started another blog for other stuff, but I just never seemed to get around to posting to it. You're going to start seeing even more non-diabetes stuff in the future.

Alwin's post on integrity has gotten to me a bit today. You see, for a while, I was associating with the wrong person, mainly because I was completely fooled by him.

I won't post much of the details, but basically I was involved in an organization that was doing some really good things from an under-represented group. Unfortunately the person who put the original organization together had a severely rotten core and fooled much better people than I. In fact, he managed to obtain a peace officer's license fraudently and was an employee of a police department at the time I met him and associated with him.

It took several incidents to convince me that he wasn't what he represented himself to me. Unfortunately as a result, I am out about $5,000 -- which is a drop in the bucket as to what happened to other people -- but the good news, is that most of that $5,000 actually went to help the right people.

The end result, is that I am extremely careful about who I associate with, and what groups I associate with. I haven't even joined a dog club since that happened, and I avoid doing any type of volunteering or contributing money until I know a lot about the group. I don't even trust background checks anymore since this episode in my life, since this guy managed to pass police academy and police department background checks.

Part of the issue, was that it was my own reputation for integrity that got others pulled into the mess.