re: Coolest Job(s) You Ever Had....?

I was an industrial hygiene consultant for the Air Force for a couple of years. The variety of the projects we worked on was great. In 2006, I started out on a firing range project where instructors in indoor ranges were experiencing irritation when they made the change over to frangible bullets, couple of weeks later we were doing beryllium surveys in an F22 hangar, surveyed a Thunderbird being painted, we went to Marfa, TX to do a noise survey on a weather balloon launch, noise surveys for the AF Band, stood inside an anechoic chamber, monitored environmental remediation at Cape Canaveral, we had an AFRAT radiation exercise in Canada, emergency response training at all AETC bases, etc. I’m probably forgetting some stuff. The last survey that I did in that job was a camera cleaning task on the U2. I accepted a civilian job at the bowling alley at Beale AFB.

My base was selected to close during BRAC in 2006. I chose to not re-enlist. As cool as it was, it was tearing my young family apart and my wife wanted no part of living in Dayton, OH. She really didn’t like where we were living in San Antonio either.