Staff

Staff

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Our job here is about to get turned upside down in terms of staffing.  Due to the fact we use military personnel to do most of this transition training, we all serve 1 year rotations before we are replaced, usually by another person in uniform.  Needs of the different branches will either extend individuals or by some miracle, shorten their tours (hmmm... which one am I hoping for?) but for the most part everyone knows how long their tour is going to be before they show up.  The human resource gurus do their best to stagger things so that we don’t replace everyone at once.  Due to the high turnover, the next group really needs the continuity in order to succeed.  HR, however is run by humans, and humans make mistakes.  There are personnel in key positions that would normally have a replacement in country to train for a week or two to do the “mind-meld” before they go their separate ways.  Unfortunately, this isn’t going to happen for a few of the leaders in our team, which means that the rest of the section gets to pull double duty by keeping an eye on their own lane of responsibilities and covering down on the missing individual’s job.  Depending on the reliability of the air transportation (come on Air Force... let’s make this happen!) we’ll end up doing this for about 3 to 4 weeks until we get to dump the information, now second hand, onto the replacement.  The stand-ins, eager to lighten their own work loads, don’t do the best job of conducting a proper hand off, and the unfortunate replacement is hit from all sides with jobs that were mostly neglected for the last month.  It’s not a great system and we all know it, which is why it is commonly referred to as “drinking from the fire hose”.  Extra points to those of you who know the movie reference and the character who said this.  

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I’m giddy with anticipation of my computer and/or disks to fix my busted laptop.  Mail from the states takes roughly 7 to 10 days to get here, and today will be day 8.  The absence of a mail truck yesterday meant that no mail was delivered to the base.  We usually get twice the amount of packages after a day with no mail which increases my chances to be laden down with boxes for the ride home tonight.  We have an informal contest between the folks in the section, which has turned into a semi-formal popularity contest.  The daily “Big Mail Winner” is the individual who gets the most long distant parcels, however points are subtracted if packages are a result of you buying stuff online and getting it shipped to you here.  We call that “Amazon Love” since you can get just about anything through the Amazon.com site (it also helps that the military internet doesn’t block it).  I haven’t had the time to do much online shopping, but I’m fortunate enough to have been the “BMW” a few times during my tenure thanks to my family and friends, although I do have a few “solo” wins since I was the only person in the section to get a letter from the states.  Hey, I’ll take my victories where I can get them.