Why Do I Miss the Bad Times, and What If I Don’t Enjoy What I’m Good At?

Like a nervous farmer a week away from harvesting a bumper crop I woke up at 0200 to check the weather. I was the on-call point of contact for the City of Austin’s Flood Early Warning System, and I was rusty. It’d been nearly six months since I was the decision maker during a weather event.

Last Friday our office got a warning that we were going to see three or more inches of rain around Wednesday. So, I spent Saturday and Sunday neurotically checking National Weather Service pages and weather models every six hours looking for changes. Forecast totals kept decreasing for the event right up until around 2100 last night.

The HRRR (High Resolution Rapid Refresh), a short-range weather model, spiked from a half inch to just under our Flash Flood Guidance warning threshold. My hope for a dull Thursday morning watching radar from my kitchen table went poof. I crawled in bed, set an alarm and tried like hell to fall asleep before midnight.

Nothing was really happening at 0200, but when I woke up again at 0330 the radar picture and regional rain gauge data could not be downplayed. I grudgingly pulled on my 5.11 clothes and slunk out of the house at 0400 on the dot. The Emergency Operations Center (EOC) was a half hour drive without traffic and I had slick roads and fog to deal with.

The weather had been unusual for Texas in January; fog, drizzling rain, warm fronts out of nowhere, and oppressive low clouds. The air felt like summer thunderstorms way out in the Pacific when we were a hundred miles offshore. It pressed in on me through my clothes and seemed to drag at my limbs as I walked.

Save for one sleepy driver who couldn’t maintain their lane I made it to the EOC in one piece.

What followed was the very dull morning I’d been hoping for. I watched radars, rain gauges, creek stage gauges, news feeds, and the official NWS Slack chat feed for any up ticks in the data that meant I could start closing roads and waking up important people. I had the entire EOC watch floor, and coffee maker, to myself. By 0930 the storm front had cleared the county line, and my boss had already signed off our MS Teams channel.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of almost having to respond to an emergency that never quite happens. You prepare your mind for the worst case, knowing that no one else is awake or as keyed up as you are… and it just fizzles out to nothing. Only there’s no relief from dodging the bullet. Your left waiting for an adrenaline dump that will never come.

Driving home I slurped the last of my government standard Folgers and ruminated. My boss had given me a couple “atta boys” when he’d joined me remotely around 0600 to offer help if I needed it. Apparently, I made a few sound decisions and that felt good. For the first time in a long time I felt that odd sense of satisfaction from being a part of a team that accomplished what it set out to do with only minor hiccups. The last time I felt kind of confidence and fulfillment was aboard the cutter after a long and complex law enforcement evolution.

Part of it was the ramp up stress and sleep deprivation too. I was home and at my kitchen table by 1100. Sitting across from my wife I tried to process why I was tired, strung out, and in a good mood. I’d drunk an entire pot of coffee and it was sitting in my gut like a medium roast brick. I felt a slightly manic episode coming on and decided to mitigate it with a klobásník (AKA kolaches in Texas, they are a giant pig in a blanket and the perfect hangover food).I chewed the greasy sausage in a roll and tried to prod brain into gear, to think through emotions before they made me say or do something stupid.

The punchy, not quite un-hinged feeling I get when my blood turns to a soup of caffeine, fight or flight hormones, and fatigue toxins was a familiar and comfortable thing. The weird part is that, in that moment, I missed it, I was homesick for it.

Despite all the things that went sideways on that cutter and my mental health bottoming out, on the drive home from the EOC I wanted to be back aboard that boat heading down range again. Despite having a nearly three-year-old son who is the center of my world, a big part of me wanted, still wants, to be in that uncomfortable, dingy, stressful world.

I did not like my job in the Coast Guard. Actually, I hated it with a passion. It’s necessary, thankless, and critical work… that I am unfortunately good at.

Aboard the cutter I could manage multiple radios and conversations at once. We were efficient enough the officers crowded around the chart table with us rarely had ask for data or issue commands inside the OPCEN. Which left them to coordinate with our TACON state side. I was pretty good at trouble shooting radios, managing all the classified non-sense, and navigation too.

As much as I disliked the OPCEN work, I got a grim satisfaction out of being useful and reliable. I did my “in rate” tasking in addition to the dozen odd collateral duties I took on to keep occupied. I think I picked up all the extra work to find something I actually enjoyed to justify my time away from my wife.

Working for the city I spend most of my time installing or repairing flood cameras and sensors. I’m ok at it but it’s not my dream job or passion. It’s vital work that makes what we do in the EOC possible in the first place, but I don’t look forward to it. A standard service call to a rain gauge takes an hour. Forty-five minutes of which is fighting traffic to get to a site. It’s outside, but there’s a reason I don’t write about it much. About the only time I get a real adrenaline dump is when a distracted driver nearly runs over us on the roadside.

The blue-collar culture I grew up would tell me to “quit your bitching” and be grateful for the steady work whether I like it or not. As much as I disliked my job in the Coast Guard I wonder if I should I have stuck it out until I was able to make it work? Should being good at something be enough to keep a person in career?

Obviously I walked away from the Coast Guard. I have to wonder if miss it because I romanticized the bad times to forget just how unhappy I was. Three days of bad water makes for a great sea story, but after 18 hours of scream puking into shower drains until you rupture the tiny blood vessels in your eyes the novelty wears off. Spending three days pulling apart a trawler full of rotting shark carcasses looking for drugs is a unique experience I never want to have again. Navigating a cutter through the dense fog of San Francisco on a busy morning is nerve wracking at best.

So, what do you do when you don’t enjoy what you’re good at? When I asked my wife, she snorted and said “Get good at something else. Be willing to be bad at what you enjoy until you’re good at it.”

1200 words into this article of naval gazing and all I had to do was ask her. Now I just have to find someone to pay me to be terrible at brewing beer and writing books until I improve.

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K.C. Aud has made a career of being lucky and has managed to find something positive in nearly every poor decision he’s ever made, even if it was only a new perspective on how not to do something.
Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 2010 he became an Operations Specialist (radio and navigation) and did his first tour in Georgia guarding submarines from drunk fishermen. In 2014, tired of the heat and the bugs he transferred to a 210-foot medium endurance cutter in Washington state. The cutter then regularly deployed to the hot and buggy west coast of Central America to hunt down drug runners. Aboard USCGC Active he traveled 94,194 miles and personally handled enough cocaine to keep a small country high for a decade. Somewhere in there, he learned to write, if not spell.

Three years later, daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of his career in a windowless command center, he separated from active duty. After 13 different jobs ranging from beer brewer to dairy farmhand, to machinist, to Navy civilian contractor, he reenlisted in 2020 as a Coast Guard reservist, changing rates to Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. When not helping the Navy assets in the Puget Sound troubleshoot radios, he’s on drill in Seattle doing water cop stuff and or flailing away at his keyboard. Though married and now a father, he misses the mission.