Sunday, September 30, 2007

27 September 2007: Now it's time for R&R

Most of the time, it’s easy to be me because I have fun doing just about anything. Sometimes it ain’t easy being me. It just seems the week before R&R would be easy street. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that way. I already described the pain of writing the awards. The pain being the knowledge of how the approval process works and knowing that my soldiers will be at the mercy of people they’ve never met, never served for. I mean, it’s a pleasure to write these awards. My soldiers are awesome. Fortunately, I know they aren’t in it for just a ribbon. I finished the awards and they are all out of my hands now. The other pain this week has been sudden pressure to move from our current building to another. Oh what a story it has been!

I’m not going to bore anyone with the details. It’s just another one of those “he said, she said bullshit” moments. When we returned from Mosul I was asked by the XO of our supporting unit to come up with a plan to move into a new building. The new building wasn’t ready for us to move. Besides, my team has several missions beginning during the course of this week. Knowing full well we wouldn’t be moving this week I gave her a plan that we’d move as we had a break in missions. Given our mission schedule upcoming, it could well be January before we finish the move. Well…. Somehow she reported this as my team saying that we wouldn’t move. Next thing you know I’m getting phone calls and e-mails from our command asking why I’m not in compliance with the move. I had to put on the big diplomacy hat and smooth things over. Like I said, it was he said she said bullshit. Everyone is happy now but it took all week for me to sort the XO out.

The only thing left was to pack for my trip. Don’t ask why but I was up until 0300. Maybe I’m excited about going home. I’m sure that’s a big reason. Having to deal with idiots outside my team this week surely didn’t help the stress level. Common sense in judgment and decision making isn’t always a ready commodity for some people. Occasionally, I have to dust off the diplomacy hat and smooth out hurt feelings or ruffled egos. It’s a shame to have to do that in this environment. This is the Army after all.

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