Dr. Wafel Zinraal's Diary, 29 October

After we routed the Shivans at the Battle of Flypaper Fields, the remnants of their Second Hell Roc Brigade turned to hit-and-run operations against our caravans. Damned mess they can make of things, but today, they made the mistake of picking a fight with our ace Gyrostalker pilot Smythe out on the Scyllian Way. Crushed three of them like bugs under its feet, he did, no contest. And that was just in the first minute. Probably put that man in for a commendation...

On the upside

I realize I bitch a lot in this space, but there are good things we're doing here. (Whether they're cost-effective is another question, but it's a hell of a lot better than the zero positive impact I saw from my last deployment.)

One of my guys is helping set up a fire department from scratch.

Another team taught a bunch of people how to not blow up their wells.

We've distributed some 20,000 malaria-busting bed nets.

And

Responsibility fail

So, one of the teams in the previous unit apparently signed up for civilian internet service through a local Djiboutian company. This was a couple months before we showed up. Apparently they never paid for it after that, and didn't tell my team about it.

So now these Djiboutians are telling us that we owe them over $4,000 US. That's quite impressively terrible at life, no?

Well don't I feel like a dick...

Just discovered that the reason my soldier can't get promoted is because we're overstrength on E-5 sergeant types. When some of them drop off our roster at the end of the deployment, or get promoted to E-6 staff sergeant types, those slots will open up.

I happen to be one of those holding an E-5 slot.

And have consistently refused promotion for like a year, on account of the fact that I'm getting out after this trip.

Sorry man.

So much butthurt

So, the Air Force discovered, as they were doing audits of my comrades' per diem vouchers, that I'd written something sarcastic on a document.

This document is a required "backup" to the non-standardized receipts local hotels create. It adds no information that's not already included on the voucher or the actual receipt, but it is a bit more orderly looking, I suppose. It also adds no legal leverage, because you can already fry someone for signing a fradulent voucher in the first place. So why do they force us to waste the ink and paper printing it out and having it signed, then scanned again to be uploaded?

Dunno. Power trip, maybe. Lost sight of reality, definitely. They claim it's a necessary evil, but anyone with a lick of sense can see it's not. They claim it's based on IRS requirements. Note that that's not that it's required by the IRS, but based on what the IRS looks for in a receipt when it's auditing people's tax deductions. Does the IRS audit these vouchers? Of course not. But these people are too lazy to actually think, so they create a checklist that bears no resemblance to anything useful.

Now, this document upon which I spewed my sarcasm provided all the information they want out of these. Dates, costs per day, and a signature from my comrade saying that "no, I am not defrauding the government." That's all that's on them. Nothing that would actually require a moment's thought or difficulty faking for one actually intent on defrauding the government. And it was all filled in; it just happened to include an additional comment on how stupid their system was.

Naturally, they lose their minds and revoke my ability to create and review these documents. With a few apologies to soothe their egos, I managed to get them back so long as I took the completely uninformative online classes again.

Which, by the way, contain no information about what a receipt should look like.

We are not here to be your bitches!

Stupid stupid higher headquarters.

My soldier's job is not to wash your truck.

My job is not to do paperwork so that you can steal our offices. Get off your lazy punk ass and do it yourself.

Fuckers.

Buncha people died 11 years ago.

The Big Voice here on camp has been announcing the times of certain events on that bloody day.

Years always struck me as an arbitrary way of demarcating time.

But I guess anything else would be too.

Having an airplane driven into your workspace is kind of an arbitrary way to die, for that matter.