Joe you are exactly right, though most often people tend to select themselves out of those things they can't do.
Not so much going to get coffee- but more than one person has driven very slowly to a call or even pulled over and waited until enough people got there that they could choose to block traffic rather than do anything scary.
Richard --
That description doesn't apply just to risky business. It's found in any job. After a while training with folks, you know who tries hard but lacks the skills, who is a glory hound, and who should be kept in a box marked "Open only during catastrophes." The problem is that many supervisors haven't been in the field recently enough to figure this out for themselves, and as a result, they make decisions on what the self-inflating balloons tell them rather than what their eyes should have told them. Thus, in heaven, things are arranged so that everybody's aptitudes are best used, whereas in hell, it's the same people, they're just arranged so that their aptitudes are misused.
Joe
http://ejmas.com
We had one of those guys. He'd be standing 20' from an incident and hide around a corner until more able units showed up. The guy was a real piece of work. He got "hurt" while taking the agility test (well, after he found out he failed it). I think they gave him a medical retirement or some sort of BS. He was one of the old security guards who got grandfathered into the academy when we became police. The Sgt. even recommended termination during the academy but he was buddy buddy with a lot of the civilian folks in the college. Oh well, such is life.
Christopher Covington
Daito-ryu aikijujutsu
Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryu heiho
All views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily represent the views of the arts I practice, the teachers and people I train with or any dojo I train in.