EO - (Korea) Day 17

This was a picture on a slide in one of the meetings I was watching

(a quick google image search found this copy for me) It's very interesting

The photo is from space and shows both North and South Korea at night.

Since the Korean war the North's economy has floundered and the South's has thrived...

which can all be seen just from this photo alone!

This morning I had to head into work early so I didn't do any PT. I'll probably do a little this weekend and hopefully I'll have a normal schedule next week and do PT in the morning each day. We are supposed to start having half days next week because of the upcoming holidays.
This morning we had a meeting to setup in another building. While waiting for our escort in the waiting area I checked out a trophy case they had setup. They had a number of items displayed such as rifles, pistols, id cards, ration cards etc. from North Korean defectors. It was a pretty interesting display. When we got to the meeting to setup it seems the same scenario plays out every time. We have name tags that we place according to a seating chart. There are always last minute changes, certain people want to sit in certain places and it's always a big deal because these are all high ranking officers. Why they can't get it straight before hand I guess I'll never know, but it's always a rush to try and get everything setup correctly before the meeting actually starts. It just makes me laugh (on the inside of course) to see how people can blow even the simplest things out of proportion.

The day was pretty slow after that. I had to go through some mandatory "equal opportunity" training on my own, which consisted of going through some PowerPoint slides and then signing a paper stating I went through the PowerPoint slides. The guys in our office then had to put salt on the steps and driveway leading up to the front door because of the snow that had been coming down. It seems our office is kind of a jack of all trades office and we do stuff for the entire building.

I setup for a meeting in my conference room which was for the ROK army. They brought in two laptops and one of them didn't want to display on the screen. When I tried to take a look and offer some help, I quickly found out that there was no way I would be able to help at all because of course their Windows laptop was all in Korean! D'oh! Plus there are a number of Koreans here that don't know English very well at all, so trying to communicate with them can be challenging at times. (This is where the KATUSAs come in handy as they are required to know a minimum level of English) They ended up running and getting another laptop and it worked fine for them. I then just hang out during the meeting in case there are technical problems. In the middle of the meeting they were complaining that the microphones at the table were not producing sound. Everything was turned on and I couldn't find anything wrong with the system. After the meeting we found out that someone had unplugged all the microphones at the table itself. When we plugged them back in there was a bunch of feedback (I guess that's why they were unplugged). They are all plugged into a box underneath one of the tables in the room and I think people have just kicked it one too many times. SPC Short took a look and said it's beyond his ability, so we'll have to get a professional audio person in to take a look. Until then only the podiums will have microphones.

I got off work and headed home…lol strange that I call the barracks home now. My roommate had already left for the weekend. I talked to my wife via Skype for a bit and then watched "Faster" to wind down my evening. A movie with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson where he gets out of jail and seeks revenge on everyone who betrayed him in the past. A good action flick with some nice driving sequences.  In the middle of the movie I got a call from SPC Roy and was told we didn't have to go in tomorrow morning as we previously thought. Nice! There was a meeting scheduled for 7:30 AM on a Saturday which meant that we would have to be in at 6:30. Now we are just on stand-by in case they decide to have the meeting on Sunday. Depending on world events (a.k.a. North Korea's actions) we can get pretty busy here.