Physical indiscretions can end your career swiftly

Humans are driven by their basic biological urges. To support my hypothesis, I point to our closest mammalian relative — the chimpanzee. Human and chimpanzee DNA is more than 98 percent identical. The biggest differences between man and monkey are that humans string together words in verbal and written forms and chimps don't fire other chimps for viewing perfectly legal porn at work.

Every year hundreds of firefighters lose their jobs over perceived misbehavior. It could be argued that being fired carries the same professional effect as dying in the line of duty.

The member may not have died, but as far as the department is concerned, they no longer exist. It is not my intent to minimize dying in the line of duty — only to expand the definition and shed some light on possible strategies that will allow all of us to enjoy a long retirement.

Some of you may be thinking that I have finally gone over the edge, but before you jump to a hasty conclusion, think about this: Imagine you are at home and you've consumed too much hard liquor. Your gaze wanders over to your next-door neighbor's house, and you notice a soot-faced lamb grazing in the front yard. Before you know it, the chimp region of your brain takes over. Your interspecies love tryst is interrupted by both the homeowner and local law-enforcement personnel. (Note: This is a true story.) I would rate the consequences associated with man-sheep love to be on par with having a wall fall on you. In some ways, it is even worse. When a wall falls on you, you die a hero's death; your family doesn't leave you, and you don't have to change your name and move to the Arizona-Colorado border because you will forever be known as the guy that nailed the next-door neighbor's farm pet.

The newspaper headlines are routinely littered with similar tales regarding our inflamed passions, so in keeping with FireRescue magazine's tagline, "Read it today, get caught with your pants down tomorrow," let's get this party started.

Within the last several weeks, the festivities at a fire-department award banquet shifted into high gear when several of the rank-and-file attendees allegedly engaged in sex on the buffet table. If this tale is true, it is every bit as tremendous as it is inappropriate. As if it weren't hard enough to control one's sexual appetites while on duty and at formal department functions, our workforce finds ways to compound the problem, as the following examples demonstrate.

Many departments use intranets to facilitate training and transmit messages from the grand and exalted chief of the department. Some of these computers include Web cams. As the story goes, a firefighter was conversing in a chat room with someone he believed to be one of those hot, young girls gone wild. The online conversation turned racy, and soon our doomed firefighter was coerced into manipulating his little nozzleman for the mystery woman on the other side of the Web cam. It doesn't take a leap of imagination to figure out the mystery woman was actually five of our doomed firefighter's buddies in various stations around the city. Since this act was witnessed by more than one firefighter, word quickly spread, a formal investigation ensued and everyone involved was immediately fired. Payroll stopped paying the terminated members as surely as if they had been killed in the line of duty.

Internet porn continues to be a huge distraction for organizations and has become the baseline misdemeanor most departments struggle with daily. Many fire departments have established zero-tolerance policies for workers who look at sexually explicit material on the company's dime. Fifteen years ago, my department established a policy that prohibited posters of scantily clad women in public places within the fire station. It was explained to the workforce that the department really didn't have a problem with posters of scantily clad women, but it did have a problem with the nuisance of processing complaints stemming from posters of scantily clad women, so would you please take them down and save all of us the time and nonsense? Even us B-shifters shrugged our shoulders and took down the posters. To our department's credit, if an offensive poster was found in a public place, it was quietly removed and no one was suspended, demoted or executed.

Our society expends lots of energy establishing standards for what it deems acceptable. One end of the spectrum is occupied by the moral puritans, easily identified by their high collars and long noses. The other sideline is occupied by a group of Eastern European pornographers, high on a never-ending supply of money. These two combatants come equipped with a bottomless pit of moral edicts, attorneys, lobbyists and Supreme Court decisions. The rest of us are left to navigate the minefield they have created in the center of our professional lives. No employer in their right mind wants to end up in a wrestling match with these lunatics, so we establish zero-tolerance policies and hope the workforce obeys. Life is never this simple.

Before we all crawl into our fire department bunkers and proclaim termination as the punishment for a low-impact first offense, answer a simple question. Which activity would most normal, clear-headed people define as being crazier: 1) viewing a pair of perfectly developed coeds giving one another a firm but loving spanking or 2) running into a burning building? We hire young, aggressive, pretty, hormone-saturated firefighters, and we shouldn't be shocked when one of them has a biological chimpanzee moment. I am not suggesting that we turn fire stations into Roman-style vomitoriums.

The workforce shouldn't be watching "touchy-feely" while on duty, but the consequences should fit the offense. Most Internet pornography is not illegal. If it were, overzealous prosecutors would have thrown many of the residents of California's San Fernando Valley in jail (this is where the majority of American porn is produced). Therefore, it can be argued that viewing pornography in your office on your work computer falls into the same category as booking a personal vacation, shopping for the latest MP3 player or applying for a hunting permit.

It may make us feel all-powerful to implement and enforce a set of rules for the organization, but we are not the final authority. There are a multitude of organizations that review the final outcome of our personnel processes. These groups include the local authority we work for, the media, the community, everyone's mom and the entire judicial system. Within the last few months, six firefighters who had been terminated for on-duty hanky-panky had their jobs reinstated. Imagine terminating of one of your members for viewing garden-variety Internet porn, then having to process it through a court system that refused to prosecute a beautiful 25-year-old female teacher who gave "extra credit" to a 14-year-old student. Good luck.

If your head doesn't hurt by now, consider the case of a Tennessee fire department member who is suing over the use of a take-home car and inaccurate pronouns. The member used to be an alleged male, recently transgendering into a female. In this case, the flesh wasn't weak, it was simply wrong. After returning to work, the member lost her take-home car and her co-workers began calling her "sir." If I showed up to work one day as Dominique Brunacini, and all I had to deal with was not driving my response vehicle home at night and being called "sir," I would be all right with that.

When I began my career, many large metropolitan fire departments were operating under judicial consent decrees. These federal court orders pertained to hiring practices along with cases of workplace harassment. The advancements in the fire service don't have much to do with eliminating these complaints because many departments still have judges managing their personnel sections. Where we've really made hay is in the diversity of our members who continue to get themselves into hot water for what was once the domain of high-ranking white males. It made my heart soar like eagle to read about the fire chief who has several sexual harassment complaints pending. In the good old days, it was the exclusive territory of the men to harass the women after we grew bored with harassing one another. Welcome to the 3rd millennium. The chief involved in this particular case is a woman. She is accused of mismanaging her personal relationships with some of the female members of her department. In the process, she has exploded the glass ceiling that once kept females out of positions where they could potentially abuse their power and authority. We males have hoodwinked ourselves into the fantasy that we are the masters of the universe. One only needs to look to nature to find out that the female does most of the hunting and heavy lifting, and bites the head off her companion when she is finished mating.

Where does this leave us? For years our personnel sections have hounded us to hire a workforce that reflects community. Mission accomplished. I don't think we need to develop a whole new set of complicated rules to deal with today's workforce. What works the best is to hire good people, train them, let them know the organizational expectations and treat them the way you want them to treat you. This simple philosophy works equally well for men, women, minorities, transgenders and B-shifters. Because we hire human beings (who sometimes act like chimpanzees), they will make mistakes.

When you make a mistake, how does it make you feel when your boss or department's first reaction is to fire you? The other side of this coin is if the members engage in behaviors that can lead to a prison sentence, they shouldn't be surprised if the department lets them go.

I work in an automatic aide consortium of 25 departments. During the last 10 years the organizations in this system have lost approximately 20 of our members as a result of bad lifestyle choices. These lifestyle decisions typically involve the things they put into their bodies, putting inappropriate parts of their bodies into others while on duty and a singular off-duty act of man-sheep love. If we had two line-of-duty deaths a year for the past 10 years, every safety organization in the country would be crawling up our skirt. In the meantime, substance abuse draws a yawn, empowerment and a 30-day treatment program, while sexcapades get a snicker-filled week of headlines and local newscasts, followed up with stern lectures and strong discipline.

I do not mean to digress but I would like to make an announcement — the national Everyone Goes Home safety initiative really doesn't go far enough. This program, which the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation launched in 2004, is an excellent effort designed to eliminate firefighter fatalities and injuries. Every year, more than 100 of us are killed in the line of duty, with tens of thousands more suffering serious injury. I have two very simple solutions to these problems. Part one deals with reducing vehicular related fatalities: We remove all the lights and sirens from our apparatus and respond Code 2. The second part will virtually eliminate all tactical fireground fatalities: We no longer conduct offensive, interior operations. I am fully aware that these suggestions fly right in the face of 300-plus years of tradition, and they don't stand a chance of ever being implemented. Some may also argue that they probably don't line up with our mission. Maybe not, but I don't have enough room left in this edition to jump down that rabbit hole, so let me end with this thought. It is our personal responsibility to manage our day-to-day professional lives in a way that leads to a long and harmonious retirement.

It doesn't matter if your career ended short because a burning building killed you or you got caught banging a 16-year-old girl in the station hose tower. No one will care that she looked like she was 23 and fawned all over you because you looked so sexy in that wool coat.    

Nick Brunacini has been with the Phoenix Fire Department since 1980 and has served as a firefighter, captain, battalion chief and shift commander. Brunacini helped develop the Fire Command and Command Safety — Saving Our Own curricula packages. He has been an instructor at Phoenix College since 1990.