Army Life: Don’t think, just do!

Accommodations at an Army installation are stark with plenty of rules to make your stay as think-proof as can be.  That also applies to our check-in and medical certifications.  We all spent weeks doing on-line training and getting Army medical exams just to get to this point, but the machine has an insatiable appetite for churn; rank or logic hold little sway. 

Bureaucratic trolls stare over our precious paperwork stack, hauled by us for hundreds, if not thousands of miles as if we were proudly bringing our fattest lamb to be sacrificed.  But this is an Army process I am swimming in, so logic has little standing.  Where are your extra set of glasses sir? the kind, yet staid, checker asked.   There was no mention of that in our instructions and besides, my shiny new second pair are home safe and sound until I deploy two months from now, I exclaimed.  I just lit a fuse to a bomb that I would probably not be able to get far enough from before it went off.  Well Sir that just won’t do.  We will have to make another set for you and ship it to your address………..  Really, I exclaimed?  Won’t that be a waste of resources?.....Boom!.  “I see you haven’t taken your second Hepatitis shot thirty days after the first as required?  I can’t sign off on the little box here approving you to deploy” she says with a crooked smile and a tilted head, as if I’m some little boy who didn’t finish his oatmeal before going out to play.  Well, we were only given our acceptance letters only 28 days ago, and as you can see, the Army gave me the first shot two weeks ago.  So this shouldn’t be an issue as we still have two months before we deploy I said confidently……..Boom!!! 

I will remind you that the Government has already entrusted me with its most guarded secrets in the job I held before I came here, but clearly I have been judged to be a wrench into the Borg’s finely honed machine.  It went on like that for hours for all kinds of things.  Trolls see it as their mission to second guess everyone below them on the chop chain.  Like the Safety Patrols we had at Elementary School, you give some a badge and they make living in a Rules hell their mission.