Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that the Indiana Department of Homeland Security just hired Chief John Shafer as the new Fire Training Section Chief and Director of the Indiana Fire and Public Safety Academy.

The day that the position was posted on the IDHS website and all over Facebook, my fire instructor friends and I who were qualified for the position were jockeying for position, trying to get the attention of the hiring authorities and get our foot in the door. I made a few phone calls to some friends (most of whom applied for the position themselves) and they suggested that I put my hat in the ring. We all swore a blood oath that if we individually got the job, we’d do it right and stay true to what got us where we were - high quality training for Indiana’s fire service.

We all knew that between Director Thacker, Marshal Jones, the IVFA, the unions, and the players in the game, someone got to the Governor and got him to commit to fighting for a LOT of money in the budget to fix what we’ve all been saying is broke for a long time. This Director would actually have a budget!

(To be honest, the majority of Indiana’s firefighters don’t get paid for what they do - they’re volunteers. Unless you’re from a major city, with a large budget, fire protection is an afterthought, and fire training is the afterthought’s long-desired spirit vision. There’s a lot of fundraising that the local departments do to keep gas in the trucks, but I digress…)

I hit the phones hard, and I called every major player in the game that I knew who knew of me and the way I roll. They all agreed that I should go for it.

So I did.

And I wrote the State Fire Marshal a letter.

It’s been edited, of course, but here it is.

Two days later, I got the dreaded e-mail back from SuccessFactors. And I sat and waited to see who they’d pick.

In the end, the best guy for the job got the job. I can’t think of anyone else who should have gotten the job. There is no one more qualified to bring Holcomb’s NextLevel Firefighting agenda to Indiana than someone who started in the middle of nowhere as a volunteer, made it to a combination department, passed the PERF physical, and got appointed to a ‘77 Fund position.

While he did that, he thought up the Academy’s predecessor, the Firefighter Training System, and was a District Coordinator. He worked his way up, got a name for himself as a training guy, wrote a chapter or two for a book or two, brought world-class minds to Indiana, lectured at FDIC several times, and set up his own Building Construction symposium (where the world-class guys showed up to teach). He’s more at home in the cans burning than he is at his desk at MADE.

So yeah, I’m NOT the Fire Training Section Chief, otherwise known as the Director of the Indiana Fire and Public Safety Academy.

But I know a guy…