Random closure

The Army likes technology. We’ve got remote controlled killer planes, self loading howitzers and the smartest bombs on the planet. We like us some toys! But of all the technology the military has embraced, the most overused has to be email. They love the internet too, which is evident by the multitude of websites made for soldiers to take distant learning classes, check their electronic military personnel jacket for their recent promotion point tally or see if their rich Uncle Sam decided to pay them this month. To the Army, the internet is good, but email is king. It’s a great way to distribute information to a large group of people, especially all of the unfortunate souls whose day is spent trapped behind a computer. If the safety officer has something important to disseminate, he whips up an email and sends it out. Does the Sergeant Major have a critical update to a policy memo? He just types out a mass distro to the unit. Has the early warning radar detected incoming rounds? You guessed it... an automated email is generated. I wish I was kidding about the last part, but sadly, it’s the truth. Just in case you don’t hear the sirens, or the blaring loudspeaker, or even the explosion outside your building, you can rest assured that an electronic message will flash across your computer screen informing you that “You’ve got mail! Now go find a bunker.” Why have we become so impersonal that we use email as a communication crutch? What ever happened to face to face conversations? Of the 100 or so emails I get a day, I’d say 40% come from people who sit no more than 30 feet of my terminal. That’s 10 yards or less! And why don’t people understand that the time it takes them to create a 2 page email, they could just pick up a phone and find the answer in half the time and not contribute to their carpel tunnel causing keyboard hacking? Have we become so lazy that we rely on computer emails to tell us life saving information? Maybe this digital reminder is geared toward people so enveloped in what they working on, like checking their email or creating a slide show, that the audible warnings of imminent death fall on deaf ears.

Speaking of slide shows, if there is a second place in the competition of “terribly overused technology”, it would have to be PowerPoint. Gone are the days of briefings printed on transparencies and displayed on an overhead projector for they have been replaced by the dynamic duo of PowerPoint and Proxima. Now, instead of spending half a day gathering the information you want to brief and half an hour putting it all together, you get to spend an hour desperately compiling the data and a day or twelve putting it into a whiz bang PowerPoint presentation. It’s ironic that a program created to make briefings easier and faster just makes it easier for your boss to expect elaborate 3 dimensional stacked bar graphs derived from pivot tables and embedded streaming video with transitions. If you understood any of the last sentence, then you need to put down the mouse, turn off the machine, and go get some sun.

By the way, I just got an email telling me that they closed the FOB that I live at because it’s unsafe due to the fact they found an unexploded round (UXO) near the field by my trailer. Again, good information and a great way to get the word out, but what would have happened if I turned my computer off before I got that message and I strolled back to the FOB without that tid-bit of knowledge?

“Hey, how did you get your purple heart?”

“It was because I didn’t read my email.”