My days are panning out to be very long. As I progress up the ladder, the meetings I attend get longer and longer. Oh how I love meetings (read sarcasm here). There is a lesson in every experience, I suppose. As soon as I figure out what the lesson is here, I'll write another post. In the mean time, I've got to go to a meeting.
I'm actually glad I got here during the hottest part of the year, so I'm getting the worst over up front. Things start cooling off in September. By the time fall gets here, 90 degree temps will feel pretty comfortable. The temperature today got up to around 117 degrees. I quit keeping track once it is over 110. It's all relative above that point.
Sidebar: Okay... I listened to a briefing today in which this guy spoke in the future tense about current operations, i.e. things happening in the present... meaning NOW. It lasted for over an hour. I thought I was going to die.
My bank of acronyms continues to grow. Here are a couple of new ones:
BBS - Big Broken Stuff
BFT - Big F'n Truck
Interesting Experience of the Day!
There I was... minding my own business... and in walks this high ranking official (hence forth referred to as HRO). Luckily I was engrossed in something and wasn't his first victim. Unfortunately, our G2 (Intelligence Officer) was. The G2 just sits in our area because he has to, he really isn't involved in our day to day operations. And the HRO walked straight up to him and started yelling even though he had no idea who he was talking to at the time. I can only speculate that he saw our unit patch on the G2's sleeve and he therefore assumed that he was talking to the right person.
Long story short, I had to suffer through 5 minutes of "Blah, blah, blah" at a zillion decibels, over something that I knew nothing about. And I just happened to be sitting there. Our poor G2 couldn't do anything but say "Yes, sir" repeatedly. The last words out of the HRO's mouth were, "This has 2 star visibility and you had better get it fixed!"
As this was going on, I noticed that our counterparts (the individuals we are replacing) didn't even budge, look, utter a comment or fain the slightest bit of interest. The HRO left and the G2 and I just sat there dumb founded, staring at each other, wondering what the heck he was talking about, what we had to fix, who we needed to talk to, etc. That's when our counterparts piped up. "Okay, here is HRO's M.O. He comes in here and yells at anyone he outranks because he's too afraid to take it up with people of equivalent HRO rank or higher." After learning that, my "Give-o-crap Meter" went down about 50%. After some investigation we learned that the situation, as described, didn't exist.
The moral to the story is this. The decibel at which an order is given is not always directly proportional to the urgency of the matter.
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3 comments:
In reference to your comments about meetings: I went to a conference and heard a person say, "A day without a meeting is like a day without sunshine". to this day I'm not sure if she was being sarcastic or really meant it!
This reminds me of triaging ER patients. The level of hysteria exhibited by patient and family is inversely proportional to the severity of injury.
That is a really funny story. It sounds like you are having fun out there, I hope you are. The best part of your story was the moral at the end. It is soooo true. Anyway, thanks for being over there and keeping us safe!
http://mylifeandtravels.blogspot.com/
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