Shuffle

“We never miss a chance,
We get up and dance,
And do the Curly Shuffle.”

Ah yes. The Curly Shuffle. A song straight out of my distant past. That particular tune came out during my childhood at a time when staying up late past the 11 o’clock news to watch the Three Stooges on a Friday night was a rare treat. The comedy was simple and purely slapstick, but my brother and I would crack up while fighting to stay awake to catch all of the episodes. Frankly I’m surprised that through our childhood, neither one of us ended up blinded by getting their eyes poked out by the other.

For the past day and a half I’ve had that song stuck in my head. It’s like a bad rash that won’t go away, or more specifically, it’s like that bug they put in Checkov’s ear and bored into his brain in “Wrath of Kahn”. Anyway, I’m sure it has to do with the fact that our section is going through a “shuffle” of its own, but it could be because I’m trying to find some humor in the recent events that will most definitely turn the unit upside down. Not to get into the details of it all, but the job that I’ve worked hard at for the last 5 and a half months is going away to another section as we all go through a major reorganization at the behest of the guy in charge with the stars on his uniform. It’s not fun.

I’m not a big proponent against change. In fact, I have expressed my opinion many times before that change is a good thing. Here are some examples of good changes:

1) Change in leadership
2) Change of pace
3) Change of scenery
4) Change of menu at the chow hall
5) Change of underwear

Sometimes you need a fresh vantage point to engage with a new person in order to see a different perspective or to get out of a rut. Just because you’ve done something for 3 years or so doesn’t mean that you need to continue doing it for the sake of “that’s how it’s always been done.” Plus, change gives you the chance to start fresh by leaving your mistakes and issues in the past, paving the way to move forward and start anew with the lessons of your mistakes engrained in your brain (and maybe even on your heart). Change, however, is hard. You get so comfortable doing things a certain way or become overly confident in your understanding of the quirks and motivations of the people you deal with that it’s often difficult to entertain the thought of operating another way with relative strangers. I know that what I’m spewing here isn’t any great epiphany by any means. Ask anyone who has moved to a new place, changed a job, or adjusted to a new relationship and they will most likely agree that it wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be. You’d think we'd learn from this, but some of us don't. Despite the headache and heartache of the experiences, it doesn’t prevent us from tackling new adventures in the future. Some folks are more reluctant to change, scared to leave the comfort of their shell because they don’t know what’s around the bend or over the horizon. What they don’t know is that regardless if they find the courage to crawl out to face new experiences, change will happen with or without them.

Change here in Iraq is a good thing, but it is a headache. By throwing me and countless others into new positions under the guise of “streamlining”, it makes it hard to make a smooth transition when most of us just got into our current jobs not long ago. Plus, it takes away the small bits of job satisfaction that we struggled to gather in the 5 months we’ve been here. Projects and missions started back in May are just starting to develop and the soldiers who struggled to make these things happen will not have the fulfillment of seeing the final results of their time and effort here. Morale is low due to the uncertainty of where we’ll go and what we’ll do in this new organization. Preliminary reviews of the change doesn’t seem to make much sense either. Putting engineers in logistics roles or making infantrymen create PowerPoint slides seems counter-intuitive, but it’s the Army’s blog policy is not to bad mouth our superiors or the decisions they make. So let’s just say that things around here could be better...then again, they always could be better. In the meantime, I’ll continue holding out hope that I get picked to do a decent job after the shuffle, but then again, I really don’t care what I do for the next 6 months as long as I get to go home on time.


Funny quote of the day:

“Alright. Why did someone fork my beets?”

- an Army Captain in regards to the placement of his utensils on his food tray after leaving the table to get a beverage.