Laugh or Cry

So there are some things here that just leave me befuddled.

One of them is a new officer at another post that has to coordinate some things with my neighbor. This young officer is either incredibly lazy or incredibly dumb... or both. He claims that his troubles are based on the fact the he is inexperienced with computers. For some people I can sympathize. For an officer in the modern Army and a recent college graduate, I find it hard to believe. Even the guys majoring in "Mario Kart" (OK, technically they were majoring in Sociology, but they spent much more time playing Mario Kart while high) in my dorm had a basic computer competency. Every military specialty relies on a basic computer competency these days. In short, the basic level of computer competency to check email and do work processing that he has demonstrated is all he should need to do his job. That this is the kind of person who probably used wikipedia for most of his research projects in his bogus liberal arts degree program (I'm not saying liberal arts degrees area all bogus, but I do know that no engineering or science grad would ever use lack of computer skills as an excuse) means he definitely has the basic internet skills to do his job. It's pitiful.

There are also some odd breakdowns in accountability that seem to have developed as an unintended consequence of all the mini-headquarters that popped up everywhere. Instead of supervising they micro-managed. These various HQs startd doing some basic administrative tasks that should have been done at the lower levels in order to justify their own existences. This has allowed some lower level units to get sloppy with things.

This feeds back in to the issue with that young officer described above. He is an apparently lazy guy who lacks the knowledge to seek information from the lower levels at the HQ he works at. This means a breakdown below him won't get fixed because he hasn't taken the initiative to discover it in the first place. This creates a bigger mess that leaves the next level up too busy cleaning to correct the issues below. At the bottom, they don't care that they aren't communicating the needed info up because it gets fixed for them.

Then new people rotate in, everything switches over, and some of it gets passed on properly and some doesn't. What is passed on properly is maybe fixed or maybe ignored since the last team must have been stupid and the new team will do it all perfectly.

It's way out of my lane and I have no ability to influence this particular situation at all. But I can watch from the sidelines with a mix of shock and amusement. I can listen to buddies complain about it. And I can make a snide blog posts about it.



Nothing major, but in the long run I don't think it does anyone any favors.