my biggest mistake I made while working here was to trust that my co-workers had the same work ethic that I had, or the love of the "work" we had to do. When you work in this field you dedicate yourself to the mission at hand and tend to develop side blinders and all your focus goes to getting the job done. There are others that bask in other peoples mistakes in things like paperwork, or they make notes and develop things to make themselves look better without doing anything themselves to elevate their position in the chain of command. Nepotism tended to play a big part also I went into this department from another county so I was an outsider, the majority were all relatives of higher ranking people within.