Tempus fugit

"I can't believe the kind of stuff that's being allowed to happen during the dayshift," I said with a bit of a frown on my face.
"Yeah well," he replied, "I just don't give a damn anymore."

So it's been a month or so since my last post, and I can't say that it really matters. At this point, I believe my complaints have been taken as nothing more than mere bitching, and people have decided that it's really not worth all the anti-Navy propaganda that I've been spewing from it. Anyway, I shall forge on with this particular post, and who knows, we might get a bit more as time goes on as well.

The conversation above is actually the tail end from a conversation that I had with one of the E-6's at work a few days ago. The sad thing is that with two months under my belt, I can honestly say that I'm actually starting to care about this place, and how the Helpdesk looks to outsiders. The somewhat bright part of this is that when your superiors don't care, you're free to do what you will. Free to make up your mind as to how you go about doing things.

It's kind of like choosing between the light side and the dark side of the force. Personally, I choose to make myself stand out from the clods that just do the bare minimum, if that. I keep my workspace clean, I address officers and senior enlisted types with the respect that's due to them. Even if I don't particularly care for them for one reason or another.

But I digress.

I got an e-mail from another individual that's turned out to be my real replacement. The female I'd gotten the e-mail from before is actually the replacement for one of the individuals on dayshift, much to my dismay. At first, I wasn't concerned about it because I felt secure in the knowledge that I'd be getting an E-4 to replace me, and I'd have a bit of leeway to decide how things proceeded. Instead, I'm getting an E-6 to replace me, and if dayshift has anything to say about it, he really will be coming to nightshift to replace me. This sucks because the one E-6 that we have on nightshift is a junior one, and he's probably one of the cooler bosses I've had in the entire time I've had in the Navy.

He's been in for seven years, and has an air about him that reaks of "I don't care". This isn't to say that he's not professional about work. Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact. It's just that it's been my experience that the senior enlisted types in the Navy typically tend to be hardasses that have their own set way of doing things, and bend as much as a piece of raw pasta to the notion of doing things the lax way. Fortunately, however, he'll be getting here late enough in the deployment to where it won't matter what he does. If he turns out to be cool, so much the better, but we'll see.

In the meantime, I'll just keep on keepin' on. I'll answer questions that the two of them send to me to the best of my ability, and make sure that they're better prepared for this than I was when I was sent out here. I'm not much into charity, but I can't and won't let other people suffer the same problems I did. Not when it can be helped.

Also, I finally got in touch with the detailer last night and got my follow-on orders from this place. And I gotta say: it's a beautiful thing to know what's happening with me in four months.

That said, there's nothing else to say. The Army is continuing to be cool in some ways, retarded in others. But I'll leave it at that for now. ADD taking hold and all that jazz.