Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Destruction Day - (Germany) Day 99

This morning for PT we did muscle failure. It seems like we form up for the morning PT formation, then after everyone is accounted for and some announcements are given, over half the people fall out of the formation because they are not doing any PT. It's getting a little ridiculous because today after everyone fell out to the rear we only had three people left in our platoon. We ended up going inside the racket ball court and then doing a whole mess of push-ups and sit-ups along with some other various warm up exercises and stretches.

Work today was a little more normal. I followed SPC Dub around for the morning trying to keep an eye on everything that he does. The problem is that a lot of this stuff takes repetition and I will not be getting much of it because I'll again be leaving soon for a month long FTX. I went to lunch in the food court with my sack lunch as usual, then came back to work for a bit before heading over to the finance office. Since Korea I've been told that my overseas travel from one overseas to another will allow me 30 days leave that is not charged. I took the 30 days leave, but it was charged. This didn't surprise me, because nothing seems to work as advertised in the army. I had been trying to get an answer since arriving here in Germany and get my leave days back. After I spoke with our NCOIC today she said I should be getting it back and that I needed to head to finance with the paperwork I showed her. Once at finance I realized that I would not be getting a single day back for my COT (Continuing Overseas Tour) entitlement. The finance guy said that rule went out in a past decade. He said the regulation now states that only travel is provided by the government to your home of record. So all leave charged to me will stay charged to me. This really sucks, because if I was told this would be non-chargeable leave…I wouldn't have used all 30 days. Army lesson learned: don't take anyone's word for it ever…even if it's a seasoned NCO or officer. Go check out the regulation on your own.

Back at the office we did the first of the month destructions. This involved taking classified items we have in our safe that are on a destruction list and first laying them out on a table. Not one, but two NCOs checked what we laid out against the list to make sure it was correct. We then started destroying everything that was laid out. This mostly involved shredding (I shredded so much I felt like a guy working for a crooked company trying to get rid of all the evidence as the feds are busting through the door), but a couple items had to be manually cut with scissors and then a few particular items had to be smashed with a sledge hammer! I've never had to actually use a sledge hammer in a job before, and especially not an I.T. job (but you can't really call this an I.T. job).

We ended up staying about a half hour late because all this destruction took a while and when finished we had to inventory the safes that were opened, because of course anytime one is opened we have to do a full inventory which takes a bit.

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