In the Rear with the Beer: Adventures in Garrison

First to go, last to know

2006-08-14T14:18:00.000-04:00

Today, suprisingly, has been fairly alright. Humidity is at an extremely meek 51-53%, and the work out at the gym went well. After gunny got back from his meeting, he dropped the bomb:

"Hey, how well do your Charlies fit?"

Fuck, suprise inspection? Last second ceremony? Crap!

No, gentile readers, much better.

"I need you and S to be in Charlies tomorrow to be witnesses at a Court Martial."

God damn it.

Luckily for us, it's in charlies, so it's at least somewhat comfortable. Looks like I have a fun night of fixing my uniform.

Fun with Housing

2006-08-08T12:58:00.000-04:00

Let me preface this by saying the housing I live in is old. Damn old, even. Ken a civilian that works here, remembers living in the housing when his dad got stationed here after he returned from Nam. And even then, the places were old. Doin the math, I would guess that these places were made around Post-WWII or Korean War Era. Essentially, 50-60 years old. It's possible that Eisenhower was still in the military when these buildings were created.

Alright, so Friday my wife moved down here and we finally started to live together. There was a lot of things that happened on friday afternoon, but I won't get into it. Anyway, back to the housing story. So thursday, when I am bringing stuff over, everything works fine... a/c is great, lights are good, no issues.

Friday comes around and issue #1 occurs: stairway and dining room lights fail for a bit. Now, there were storms rolling through and half of the lights/power in the town went out, so I attributed it to that somehow, but later that weekend it happened again. Bah.

Issue #2: Toilet (no pun intened, but the irony amuses me)
The damn thing barely flushed. Now, while giving your toilet a "double-tap" of flushing isn't unheard of, a quad-tap, or a hexa-tap are right out. You should not have to be flushing continuously for 5 minutes because your toilet is being finicky. Nor should you be continuously flushing for 5 minutes straight in general. If you do, please seek a doctor for medical assistance, but not a Navy Corpsman, because all they'll do is throw 53 lbs of motrin at you and yell at you about your lack of hydration.

Problem #3: Exhaust vent-fan
These things usually come in handy when you're cooking a meal/food item which is quite odorous... for example fish, or in this case, bacon. See, the fan worked fine when we looked at it, and I turned it on a few times just to make sure, but come gameday a little dot of sand graced its clitoris, and it crapped out, right as we started the bacon.
Fucking figures.

Now, all three of those problems we got fixed yesterday, much to our delight. But when the cable guy came to transfer over the internet, he discovered a new problem: cable in our room is all jacked up. Now, I managed to ghetto-rig the cable line downstairs (which works), so that I have a piece of cable running up the stairs, across the second story into my room with the router and my dektop computer, but still, thats ugly, and I dont want to have to repeat the procedure to allow us to watch tv in our bedroom, so thats the newest fix to add to the list.

Bleh.

Semper I

2006-07-29T14:13:00.000-04:00

The day started off well, amazingly enough. I didn't oversleep , and I picked up my PFC right when I said I would. PT wasn't bad either, just a short run b/c the PFC is still all broke. Once I got here though, shit went downhill. I had my meeting at IPAC today, and it turns out that the fucking private I saw a few weeks ago is out of the Corps now (verifying my assumption that he's a shitbag), but before he left, he never put in any of the paperwork saying that I was married now. I hope that fucker gets hit by a truck. Not only that, but they don’t have any of the original paperwork, so our certified copy of the license is gone, my wife's paperwork needs to be redone, and I'm still not getting any money. Gah!

This shit is more aggrivating than having to defend the freedoms of Michael Moore.

"Semper I - Fuck the Other Guy!"

Civilians got jokes

2006-07-24T08:13:00.000-04:00

I'm naturally a night owl. Like.... since day fucking one. When I was a kid, I'd always be waking up in the middle of the night and exploring around and climbing about. Back when I was a civilian, in fact, I would often use the chirping of birds in the morning as my alarm clock to go to bed. I still keep this tradition alive, but only on weekends, leave, and 96s. So around 4am on saturday morning when I went to bed, all was well.

But lets skip forward around 6-7 hours. I woke up because Jason called to ask me something about uniforms. God that's a shitty way to wake up on a saturday. First, you need to clear the fog in order to figure out what the fuck is going on, and then on top of it, you need to search through all of the mental debris that makes the rubble from the oklaholma city bombing look like a high school prank.

So he calls, asks me a question fucked up enough for me to have to fully wake up and get out of bed to answer, thus ruining my ability to go back to sleep. And this, my friends and gentile readers, is where I got tooled. I was no longer able to sleep, so I took my morning piss, but when I turned the lights on in the bathroom, nothing happend. No flicker, no flash of light followed by nothingness. Not a god damn thing, to be exact. Nay, I was forced to pee in the dark. Not a big deal, I've pissed in porta-johns in iraq for months, so I'm a natural at it. So I get irritated because as far as I am concerned, a light burned out, or our lightswitch died again.

So I wander to the kitchen/sink area, and again, I turn the light switch.

Nothing.

I turn on the computer monitor. Nada.
Check my laptop. Dead.

So dazed and confused, I wander outside to look to see if it's just us. Nope - everyone got fucked.

The timeframe of the outage varied on who you asked. At first I heard it was 1300, but that came and left sans fanfare. Then I next heard that it was at 1900: Fuck!. My roommate and I decided it was time for a movie to pass the time, and Superman was going to fit the bill. After an interesting faux-moonlight shower, I was ready to go, and we fentured in the direction of the theater. A theater, my friends, of lies and false hope.

Superman was nowhere to be found. Not unlike a Paulie Shore movie, Clark Kent had only managed to fill us with levels of dissapointment and dismay not witnessed since Fox decided to make a second season of The Simple Life.

With that being said, we went with our second choice, Pirates of the Carribean 2.

Let me say that, although it's not a bad movie, it does make you feel as if it prematurely ended. Almost as if the director just didnt feel like working, and said "Cut!" in order to get a three-day weekend. Now, I realize that they have already filmed the 3rd movie, and the 2nd one is designed to build up for the 3rd film, but still. If I remember correctly, the 2nd Matrix movie has more closure than Pirates 2. Oh well... we can always hope that the final installment is filled with grandeur, and discover for ourselves next year.

Anyway, 1830 rolls around and we got out and retuned to the barracks. That was the slowest hour ever. We just sat there bored as fuck, and debated whether or not we should just swan dive off of 3rd deck onto the grass/pavement below.

If I ever see those electritians again, I'm going to boot them in the nuts .

Slow F'in Day

2006-07-21T11:11:00.000-04:00

I really don't know why I am posting this... I think it's mostly just to pass the time, really. It's been a slow-as-fuck day. My wife has the day off, so I have no one to talk to over Outlook IM, and there's really nothing to do at the moement. I know I'm fucking myself by saying that, and as soon as I click on publish, the entire base network is going to get fried, and I'll be flooded with calls... well, we will, I have a cpl here as well, but shit, man...

I say we call it a day at noon.

Oh, it's good to be with station...

2006-07-20T13:34:00.000-04:00

It's been exactly 45 minutes since I returned to work, and I just got released for the day!

Huzzah!

Non-Mission-Capable Intranet

2006-07-20T11:09:00.000-04:00

This is the most trecherous tale of hate and dismay you'll run across in the data field. Any discontent caused by microsoft looks like a beer run in comparison.

A few years back, the Navy had a problem. They all had a bunch of programs that were basically doing the same thing, but were incompatable with eachother. Since there was no standards (or if there were, they weren't enforced), it made things a real kick in the wang to plan stuff out. The Navy, in their infinate wisdom, decided not to start enforcing standards on software or anything, but rather, to hire civilians to unfuck their network. And because the Marine Corps is the bastard step-brother of the Navy, guess who got fucked and sucked into their triangle of hate? Yeah, we already had standards which we followed, but we still got stuck with the deal. Now, none of the data Marines in units cut over to NMCI have any rights at all, so we're at mercy of corporate civilians who, frankly, don't give a fuck.

And if you have a problem, or you get promoted, may God, Satan, the Great Pumpkin, Batman, or Artie - the strongest man in the world from Pete and Pete save you, because damn near no one else will. When you call, you have to guess your way through an automated maze. And then the fun begins. You go on hold. And hold. And hold. And hold. I've been on hold before for 45 minutes. I literally fell asleep in my chair with the phone next to my ear, waking up every time some pre-recorded message from a guy with a lisp told me that my call was very important, and I can email them for non-critical issues. Fuck that, and fuck you, lisp boy!

About every year or so, there is a rumor that goes around saying that the Marine Corps is sick of NMCI, and we're going to dropkick their asses out the door like some clingy prostitute who wants to cuddle after sex, but those rumors have been squashed like a bug. Apparently, The Navy extended the contract until 2010. And after that, we have the option to lease the gear from EDS, go with a competator, or buy all it all, and let data Marines/sailors do their jobs again and run the network.

But here is where EDS/NMCI gets the last laugh: even if NMCI gets dropped, we're still screwed. Over 3/4 of the Marine Corps is with NMCI, meaning that most data Marines haven't really run a base network, except for whatever training they have had in training ops, or when they deploy. I got here in 2004, and it was after NMCI took over for my unit. Because of this, I've never really done anything in terms of running a base network. My only experience with a garrison network is doing basic help desk stuff - just answering phone calls, and either redirecting the calls to people that can fix it, or putting in trouble tickets to resolve the issue.

And that, my friends, is how they get you. Think of NMCI as a heroin dealer… only a dealer that somehow tricked you into a contract where you had to shoot up, regardless of how you like it. So… you've already paid for all of this heroin that you have to take for the next few years. After the contract is up, you've been more or less forced to continue taking it because you're fucking addicted now. And that is where we stand. We'll have almost an entire MOS of Marines who have never done their jobs before because civilians have been doing it for the last decade, and it will be rough. God help us if that happens, and god damn the people who came up with this idea in the first fucking place.

"If we don't take care of the customer, maybe they'll stop bugging us."
-Dr. Larry Kersten

IPAC Wars

2006-07-19T23:20:00.000-04:00

Quick rundown of how my meeting with IPAC went today for those who care...

Starring: the O RLY owls

Me: I need to get BAH/housing so my wife has a place to stay when she moves down here in 2 weeks.

IPAC:

Me:

IPAC:

Me:

IPAC: Too bad!

Later, after I got my gunny to assist me:

Gunny: My Marine needs to get housing for his wife.

IPAC:

Gunny:

And thus, IPAC got owned, and next week I get housing.

Don't get the O RLY joke? Go here for the details.

Semper I!

2006-07-19T12:55:00.000-04:00

Money for nothin...

2006-07-18T20:59:00.000-04:00

...and your chicks for free.

Or so goes the song.

About a month and a half ago, I got married to my wife (yeah, I know, good person to get married to, right?), and after a royal clusterfuck, I finally got all the paperwork and went down to IPAC to see if I could get hooked up with some cash, somewhere. After sitting there for a bit with some private, I got jack shit. No BAH, no BAS, not even fucking seperation pay, even though my wife is stationed in Missouri. I didnt think I would get all of that when I got in, but I figured seperation was a given seeing as we're in different states and shit. But no, that private shot me down, like a bitch. Not that he was a boot private who was motivated and trying everyting in his power. No, he was a fucking shitbag private. I know, that can sound like a harsh label, but let's look at the facts:

While looking at my BIR/BTR he noticed that we went to boot on the same day, just opposite coasts
My friend Mike was in the same company as him. This is the funny part though, Mike told me about 2 years ago or so that his company was filled with shitbag recruits. He had a guy in his company that shat and pissed himself on a daily basis. Wow.
I'm a LCpl , and he's a fucking private. Owned.

So anyway, because my wife is getting out and moving here, we need a place for her to move her shit to, and thats kind of hard, when I can't get money for a place, or apply for housing. Long story short, between our assorted chains of command we somehow managed to slap sense back into my IPAC not unlike what you would do to a wayward red-headed stepson. Tomorrow I meet with one of the Cpls there and we are sitting down and unfucking all of this and starting my backpay so my wife and I have a place to stay until we figure out wtf is going on.

Moral of the story: if a private tries to help you, say no, and ask for an E-3 or higher.

"The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence."
-Elbert Hubbard

Someone needs to implement QC on boots

2006-07-18T17:35:00.000-04:00

Hate your enemies
Save your friends
Find your place
Speak the truth
-Nirvana, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

Alright, maybe it's just me, but have all PFCs just become totally worthless? I mean, I'm just a fucking lcpl, and I'm not perfect by any means, but still... I don't remember being this fucking short-bus when I was a PFC....
this guy that we have in ym shop is an 18 year old pfc straight out of boot. He's got a problem with talking back to NCOs, and doesnt hae common sense to save his life. I know the thing with data marines is that we're supposed to be book smart, not street smart, but this goes beyond the normal acceptable "wow" factor of your standard data marine.

Last week he almost (or maybe he did, I don't remember and I wasnt there) fell out of some change of command ceremony because he was dehyrdated, even though he was in the shade. Nice...
Anyway, friday he shows up to work with a bunch of rip-fuel bullshit, and I guess he took it over the weekend. Monday he comes to work feeling "weird, lightheaded, and dizzy." So he checks his ass into medical. While he's there, he neglected to tell the doc about the supplement bullshit, so he got emitted to the ER for an irregular heartbeat and all of that. Afterwards, he got the rest of the day SIQ because of it.
Today he showed up and I guess he got a call for one of our cpls to get his orders to go to the rifle range, but he didn't take a message, so the cpl almost got fucked as a result.

Fuckin WOW.

I really don't even know what to say to that. How do you not scribble down a few words and a phone number? In the words of my wife in reference to the PFC in question: "Tell him your wiff said to grow the fuck up. I'm not in the mood to put up with stupid shit."

This pic summarizes everything:

Donde Esta?

2006-07-18T17:24:00.000-04:00

Hey, I'm a data marine stationed in NC. I've got a blog that I started while deployed, but I got all busy, so I wasnt able to update it much as I had hoped while I was out defending democracy, alcoholic pursuits, and rock 'n' roll on the tax payer's dollar. Now I'm back in the states, and due to boredom, have decided to start up another blog to pass the time, and possibly to humor, offend, entertain, irritate, (etc) you. I'm 23 and I'm married. As you'll see, garrison life is just as entertaining as being deployed, but you dont have jackasses trying to blow you up as often.