BunkBlog

New section on my site, which will soon be filled with cool stuff. Photo album

My job is so boring even I can’t stand to describe it. Let’s just summarize and say it involves creating documents based on other documents and an occasional test event. Primarily, though, it’s just sitting at a computer and editing things.

My coworker has been working on a monster document for the past 2 months, and the boss’s boss (B2) has edited it at least twice before, as well as the boss (B1) editing it several times as well.

Last week, the document made it to the tech editor finally. The tech editor spewed forth 15 pages of edits, including some surreal parenthetical comments apropos of nothing. Fifteen pages is considered “getting off light” with this fella (yes he’s Mensan), also referred to as “frustrated English professor”. After spending a day making the changes, coworker sends document off to B1 again. B1 now has some major heartache with it, and orders further changes to the changes to the revisions to the updates.

Gets to B2 late yesterday, back today from B2. Many, many more changes. A large number of the changes are things that the all-knowing master of time space and English had told coworker to change. Now, those items have changed back. Other changes involve sentences composed entirely by B2 in the first place, but now deemed unspeakably wrong.

Ever seen Falling Down? Very understandable movie some days…
current_mood: bitchy

Pooka! Hope you’re having a great day. 🙂

OK, here’s the latest creation: Black Forest Cake.

4 layers (2 split cakes). First layer topped with cream cheese frosting and drunken cherries. Second layer topped with fresh chocolate mousse. Third layer topped with whipped cream, and the sides frosted with stiff whipped cream. mmmmm

It did not last long…

Well, whoever sent me Office Space, thanks a bunch. Love that movie.

Hey, BlooJanuary! Happy Birthday, girl!

Monday –

This is a favorite anecdote that I share with folks I know. Back in 1992, I was in the Army at Fort Ord, based in lovely Monterey California. There was a junior enlisted fellow that worked in the supply room, and he had been working there before I arrived at the unit. After a few months, I found out his story, and it was a doozy.

This soldier, PV2 Gardner, was not a supply specialist, but a communications specialist. Since we had no commo section in the battalion (they had been moved to higher headquarters two years or so earlier), I inquired as to why Private Gardner was here, issuing paper tablets and computer disks, rather than assigned to a unit where he might have the chance to connect up some radios and telephones.

Well, he had been on assignment to Korea a couple years earlier, leaving at the same time as the rest of the commo folks that had been assigned to the battalion. As he outprocessed the battalion, division, and post, he did everything as normally expected. Then SPC(P) Gardner got to the housing office, and they were in the middle of a big inspection. The housing folks, looking at his ship date, realized he could stand to wait, while the bigwigs that were breathing down their necks would not wait. “Go home and we’ll call you,” he was told. Ever obedient, he went home and waited.

After his report date had passed without incident and he was still at home waiting, he decided he’d been forgotten. Normally, a soldier would be forthright and get back to the offending party as soon as possible, and certainly before he was late for his next assignment. This is referred to as being Absent Without Leave, or AWOL, and is not a good thing. Well, Gardner just stayed home and collected his Army pay for a while, then went out and got a civilian job as well. With his two paychecks, he was doing pretty well for his family. One day he got a phone call.

The Housing Office needed to speak to him. They had some news for him that he’d been waiting on for a while: his new government quarters were ready for occupancy. Yes, this soldier moved from off-post housing to on-post housing while still AWOL from his unit.

After two years or so, the commander wondered why he kept getting Leave and Earning Statements for some guy he’d never heard of named Gardner. He started a low-key investigation, and after 4 months got the answer. Now it gets really weird.

CPT Isham was hoping to get picked up for Major that year, and was doing everything possible to maintain a spotless record of command until the board convened. Obviously, having someone AWOL for 2 years without reporting it would be a bit of a smudge on one’s record. So, when CPT Isham finally caught up with SPC Gardner, he brought him back to the unit and charged him under non-judicial punishment for Failure to Repair. This is the military equivalent of not showing up for work on time, hardly the same thing as being a deserter. Desertion is defined as being AWOL for more than 30 days under normal circumstances (it’s immediate for those in special security positions), and 29 months was certainly more than 30 days by any calendar.

Gardner received a particularly harsh punishment for his actual charge, and was reduced in rank from a promotable Specialist (nearly a Sergeant) down to a Private-2. He was also fined a month’s pay and kept on restriction for 14 days. Since his job had been erased long prior, he was put in the Supply Room to give him gainful employment while he lost weight. You see, he’d put on so much tonnage while he was AWOL that he no longer was anywhere near the weight standards, and you can’t transfer to a new unit when you’re overweight. Or at least, you couldn’t then.

All would have been relatively normal at that point, if Gardner wanted to resume his military career. He didn’t. If a soldier who has been in more than 6 years gets kicked out of the army for being overweight, he gets severance pay. Our intrepid hero just kept that weight on until they had no choice but to send him back to civilian life, a few grand richer even.

All this seems to explain the reason for the title of this essay, but I’m not done yet. His attentive wife, upon looking back on the accumulated earning statements, realized the army had screwed up somewhere back in the beginning of this adventure. While living in an off-post apartment, a soldier is given a set amount of money for his pay grade and an additional amount for the area where he lives. Monterey is an expensive area, and Gardner had not received all the Variable Housing Allowance he was “owed” for his time off-post. Yes, that’s right folks: while spending 2 years sucking up unearned military pay, the boy actually had the gall to ask for some extra money. Since the commander had not charged Gardner with desertion, he was considered to have been on active duty in good standing the entire 2+ years he was playing basketball with his sons all day. The man actually got back pay for the time he was not at work!

Now, if that isn’t a gigantic pair, I don’t know what is.

I’ve posted the latest and greatest statistics for my website this weekend. Big news: folks from C|Net downloads are hitting my site more lately than folks from LiveJournal. Hmmmm…

In other web-building news, I’ve added a new Random Meandering Thought, this one a little anecdote about a really ballsy guy I knew a while back.

Enjoy.
current_music: dead batteries in RioVolt
current_mood: bored

Hey, you guys are just not as generous to strangers as I had hoped. Check out my wishlist at Amazon, or CDnow. A mere 13 days until my birthday. Hop to it!
current_mood: greedy

OK, so I put clothes in the hamper, I keep my towel on the rack, I make sure to not spray water all over the bathroom… When I’m left to my own devices, I rinse my dishes and put them in the dishwasher, running them when the machine is full… I don’t leave food out, it goes in the fridge all wrapped in plastic or in the trash…

How am I a slob? < Pout >
current_mood: petulant

So, although I make plenty of money and can afford the usurious rent payments here, I have been denied for a mortgage that would leave my payments at least 50 dollars per month lower? Figure that logic out. Fuck me in the goat ass.
current_mood: pissed off

OK, if Corto can admit it, so can I. I, too, am a male baker. Whew! I feel so much better.

Today was Baklava Day. Baked up a big ol’ pan of baklava and even used the scraps (my pans are too narrow for the phyllo dough) to make rolled baklava.

So, in the past year I’ve made a bunch of baklava, a pumpkin cheesecake, a chocolate cheesecake, and various brownies and cookies. Next up: black forest cake. Mmmm, I love that stuff.

Of course, being not quite the glutton I once was, the majority of the baklava is going to work to feed the ungrateful ones I must spend many of my waking hours with.

Even as the Microsoft breakup ruling has been nullified, MS still makes some entertaining news. One of the long-time Microsoft-backers, David Coursey of ZDNet, has been bitten by the registration bug/feature in Office XP, and now can’t even use the legal copy of Word he needs to do his journalist job. Love it.

OK, forgot this one for a few days, while thinking of how to add context and failing.

Most incongruous statement during a Mensa picnic: “I’m no genius, but…”

So, working for DISA, the information systems folks for the military, we send many documents around for review to various bosses (I’ve got 8 bosses, Bob – Office Space).

These documents are 40 pages and longer, and we print them out single-sided and hustle them around via sneakernet throught this 5-acre compound. After we print a couple copies for different folks to review, we make more copies of the changes and then of the changes to the revisions to the updates ad nauseum.

Why aren’t we sending this by email? Because “it’s easier to mark it up on paper” they say. And these are the IS masters for DOD? Hi, I’m a revision mark and comment in Word…
current_mood: amused

For some reason I was thinking about alligators eating people today, and kind of let the mind wander a bit.

Experts always say that sharks (and most other big predators) don’t like the taste of people, and only eat us by accident. Seems like a pretty big accident, and I’m sure the victims don’t feel relieved by it being an inadvertent mistake. More importantly to my twisted mind: how do scientists know we taste bad to sharks? Is there a taste test they do? Some sort of aquatic predator version of the Pepsi Challenge? I don’t get it.

Maybe that wacky Steve Irwin would know…
current_mood: bored

Happy Birthday, Rayne!

Went to my first Mensa meeting this weekend. Overall, it was pretty decent. The host seemed to have some abiding hatred for families with small children. Well, he didn’t actually say that, but he didn’t want them living next door to him. Made me think of old movies or stories with the term “those people” used liberally.

Another oddity: one of the guests, who had brought store-bought fried chicken to a potluck dinner (not even KFC), wanted everyone to keep her disposable plates and plasticware, so she could wash and re-use them. Apparently she has a difficult time finding plates that fit in her wicker plate-holder baskets, and the red and blue plasticware is so hard to find, except at the beginning of July.

Just proves that smart people are not always very normal.
current_mood: tired

So, the fine intelligent IS professionals that work for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) have finally gotten around to installing Office 2000. Now we’re only one generation behind, woohoo. Simultaneously, they upgraded the browser to IE 5.5 (not SP1 yet but at least within a year of the current version) but with their security enhancements turned on. More accurately, many features turned off, such as Java (no loss), Javascript (kind of important), and VBScript (thank goodness). The loss of Javascript means that many of the sites that we are required to go to to complete our normal daily jobs are inaccessible or broken when using Internet Explorer.

The DISA “solution”? Use Netscape 4.7, which is still the official DISA browser. Good to see that the Information Systems masters are so completely out of touch with modern realities.

Firstly, if they wanted to enhance security by turning off Javascript, why leave it enabled in Netscape? Secondly, although I’m hardly a Microsoft fan, it’s absurd to pretend that all sites will work with Netscape. Does the term Embrace and Extend ring any bells at DISA, I wonder.

And these are the folks that the Department of Defense entrust with their most prized IS tools. Your tax dollars at work.
current_mood: amused

Well, if can do it, I suppose I can. Check out my wishlist at Amazon. only 5 weeks until my birthday. Heheh
current_mood: silly