They have no idea I...

Every so often, my older sister will ask me what I do for work beyond knowing I'm an investment guy. Three or four years ago, my oldest brother asked me if I still work.

I engage with quite a few people in this realm and I don't think any of them know I'm an investment guy but the do know about my firefighting on some level.

Half of them think I am an accountant.

At least half of them don't know I am the fire chief or maybe even that I am a firefighter.

I get the sense that very few in my family actually understand the magnitude of my entire fire department gig. As the youngest kid in the immediate family there's an element of not taking me seriously on any level, like I'm the lucky idiot, from two of the four. Of course they could be right.

My blog is investment related. A mutual from Baseball Card Twitter that I've known on there for 2 1/2 years very recently read one of my blog posts for the first time and he commented "you're a smart fella." Up until that point our only engagement had been sports related, it was like a whole other aspect of me that he discovered.

I'm pretty sure most of them just know me as the guy who's been chief at Walker Fire for a long time. I'm friends with a few on Facebook but that's it. There have even been a few instances over the years where someone I knew for a while did not realize I was a volunteer. Of course that is a huge stroke but it supports an idea that I've had for a while which is that the world doesn't care that we are volunteer department.

We definitely have less training than professional departments and we get plenty of help when we need it but there are certain things that are crucial that we have to be able to do. One example is that one of the larger departments responded to help a different department in our area a while back and the different department did not know how to pump its truck, the big department had to do it for them. That I, having no involvement with that incident, ever heard about is very telling and something we will make sure never happens with us.

A few know exactly what I do for a living but plenty don't. No one in the department has ever really known about my blogging, I used to be very widely followed, and only a couple know I used to go on stock market TV regularly. I've helped quite a few people figure out diet and exercise stuff through Facebook and Twitter which I feel great about but I don't think they realize that, they just know I talk about something related before each training. I made the attached baseball card as part of the #JGMVP campaingn last summer and I asked everyone to vote for it but I don't know if any of them understand my interest. I have a few left, just make a donation of at least $15 to the Josh Gibson Foundation, DM me proof and your address it I'll send you one.

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