Monday, March 25, 2013

Garbage Man (Reprise) - (Germany) Day 453

This morning for PT we formed up at Campbell gym in civilian clothes. Those not on profile headed off post for a run, while those of us on profile stayed in the gym to workout. I rode the stationary bike for a pretty good cardio workout.

I headed into work and shortly after arriving, I got a call asking if I could do the post cleanup detail today. I checked with the chaplain and he said there was nothing pressing for me today. He doesn't like having me gone the entire day for post cleanup, but because the rest of the company is doing training…it only left me.

I thought I was done playing garbage man…I thought wrong. I had planned on doing some stuff to prepare for out-processing today, but I'll have to put that off until tomorrow. I headed home and changed into civilian clothes. Nothing worse than carrying around a garbage bag and worrying about saluting or taking my hat on or off. I worked with a guy from the dental clinic that I've done post cleanup with a few times before. This time he showed up and didn't have any rank on. It turns out he got into some sort of trouble and was demoted to E-1. He is also getting chaptered out of the army. I didn't press to find out exactly what was going on, because he was still in a little shock about the whole ordeal and didn't seem like he wanted to talk about it too much.

So we did our garbage cleanup around post, I had lunch with my wife and bought lunch for the dental soldier with me (his bank accounts are currently frozen because of whatever trouble he got in). We finished up early at about 1300 and I headed home for the rest of the day.

The longer I'm here the more I dislike the army. While I really don't mind helping out the chaplain, I have a lot of time where I'm doing nothing…which is similar to my job working in the ComSec office. I also actually don't mind pretending to be a garbage man. I get to wear civilian clothes and I get done early and go home. The army just doesn't use it's resources very well. If it were a business, it would have gone out of business a long time ago. I was trained to do a particular job for the army. I actually came in with many years of experience to do this particular job. I have a number of certifications in the field of this job. I graduated at the top of my AIT class for this job. I broke the schoolhouse record when getting my security+ certification for this job. Then the entire time I've been in the army, I don't do the job. It happens to soldiers all the freakin' time. An entire half of the ComSec office (the maintenance side) has been shut down for half a year. They do not do anymore maintenance on ComSec equipment at all, so the soldiers just sit around watching YouTube all day. It would be the equivalent of a large hospital spending a large amount of money recruiting experienced surgeons only to have them sit around and do nothing, or perhaps teach classes on construction management (something totally different than what they are hired for). I really can't wait to get back into normal life as a civilian.

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