While you were out

We took a couple mortar rounds today and as a result I'll have to amend my previous statement detailing what happens when one hears or doesn't hear the mortar round as it approaches. Previously, I had said that I like mortars because if you hear them then you're ok and if you don't it won't matter anyway. Here's the amended version: I like mortars because if you hear them then you're going to be ok, if you don't hear them it still won't matter because either you won't be around long enough to care or you slept through the whole attack.


Yes, that's right, I slept through a mortar attack this morning. I wasn't particularly tired or anything, I just didn't hear the explosions or the sirens. What woke me up was the phone call asking me if we were going to have a recall, that's when everyone shows up at a certain place and we count heads, fingers, knees, and toes - knees and toes... or maybe we just count heads.

My current issue: Help Desk slides. After the last brief, where I had to pull the knife out of my back as we left the conference room, we were supposed to change the brief to give a more historical average for comparison. Now the Help Desk is a part of what it is that I do out here and compiling the brief is something that takes up a healthy chunk of a day so I've done a lot to help streamline it so that I have more time to do the other aspects of my job. For the guys on the other end of the brief at Victory Base, this IS their job. They get paid to make sure that all the help desks are operating smoothly. In an effort to address the requested change, I sent out an example of what I though would be a good solution and my counterpart (who's job it is to do this) was impressed. You can imagine my suprise when I received an email this morning with the new brief and an entirely different slide that in no way beared any resemblance to what I had provided. The problem isn't that my work was tossed aside, although I'm not happy about that, the problem is that the calculations required to provide the information that they're wanting to present would require me to TOTALLY revamp my procedures. Again, I'm not only thinking of myself here, the information that they are trying to collect to present here doesn't provide any kind of insight or a basis for comparison.

As it sits right now, I reworked the slide to show what I thought would be a good middle ground and I'm waiting to hear back. I'm going to be really upset if they push back what they sent out the first time. I'm to the point now where I'm going to tell them if they want me to help out then they're going to have to accept my input, otherwise they need to take over my part since they're the ones getting paid to do it.

Really frusterated.

The picture is one that I took today to submit to a photography contest. The theme was to send in pictures of your office/desk/workstation and seeing as how I'm in a sort of unique situation down here I though this would be quite the entry. Out of about 70 entries, mine is one of about 30 to get any votes, the leader had 7 votes and mine has 2. Not bad for a picture taken with my cell phone =)