monkeys and dartboards
I'm being fucking reassigned. I'm in my sixth of eighteen months on active duty -- that's one-third, for those of you doing the math at home -- and the army is still trying to figure out where I work or what it is that I actually do.Fuck fucking fuck. Rocket scientists.
posted by Chris Bray @ 3:15 PM
8 Comments:
So on this reassignment, is the clock still ticking and does the time you've spent still count toward the total? Do you have any idea where you might be reassigned and what you might be doing? I know you must be bored out of your mind, but it has seemed safer to have you pouring coffee in Kuwait than most of anything you could be doing.
Maybe they heard about your past experience driving drunks back from the officer's club? That's a mission-critical skill as we enter the holiday period.
Seriously, I hope you're moving someplace even more boring (considering the options).
My understanding is that I'm being reassigned to something even more boring. Inquiries have been made regarding my skills with Microsoft Excel.
Which is, in the military, a barely coded way of saying, "Ahh, do we have a basement cubicle for you.
You gotta watch that. I let it slip that I use Excell to my colleagues a few years back, and now every semester I have to help them set up their grade calculations. It's "=Sum(start:finish)/total*100", dammit. Every semester....
The hell of it is, I don't know Microsoft Excel from, like, my ass. My exact response was "um -- no?" (Be sure to read that with the appropriate upward inflection.) But I'm too far in debt to be trusted with a security clearance (I...am...a...GRAD STUDENT), and the job I've been doing requires a security clearance, so I can't do that job anymore, which you would think someone could have figured out before assigning me to that job, but never mind. There are other IRR soldiers here, and they are mostly painting rocks -- we were apparently called back for jobs that 1.) don't exist, or 2.) we can't be permitted to do. Yeah.
My very strong sense is that the army threw several thousand reservists at the wall to see how many would stick. Monkeys and dartboards, monkeys and dartboards.
Apparently someone hasn't figured out that "manpower shortage" doesn't mean, strictly speaking, a shortage of men.... Alternately, this is a really clever plot to convince the public that there's NO manpower shortage: "See, we called up all these IRR guys, but we don't have anything for them to do. We must have all the manpower we need!"
Chris, remember that you're dealing with an organization whose secretary didn't think that body armor was really all that necessary. Just be glad that you're not assigned to a protective circle of IRR's, who are too surround a general, and walk around him all day.
And hopefully, 'Excel' isn't a code word from some special forces operation.
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