silliness

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the punishment of planners

My dad was in the military before me, and I grew up moving from coast to coast. Something I remember growing up with was a certain stress innate to vacations and our moves from one location to another. I remember my parents would always have a falling-out at some point because my mother would want to have made arrangements and my dad would resist making arrangements until the very last minute.

We’d know vaguely that we were going to Washington State for Christmas, for instance, but probably not which dates we were traveling on. Multiply that times every other complicating factor (house-hunting, pet care, car trouble, route across country, etc.) when it was a move…

Anyway, I grew up thinking that this was probably just a personality conflict between my parents or possibly a male/female thing… but recently I’ve been thinking maybe it was much more related to the fact that my dad was in the military than anything else. My mom was expecting him to plan like a civilian would, but he ended up “planning” in the way that we military folks learn to… (Remember that phrase “hurry up and
wait”?)

I would naturally be a pre-plan sort of person–I’m more comfortable knowing what I’m getting into ahead of time. However, since the very beginnings of my association with the military, they’ve worked a very Skinnerian (behavioral) disincentivization process on my will to plan…

And here’s just one more nail in the coffin of my planning nature:

I have a lot of leave (47.5 days as of today, according to the Powers That Be) to take, and I’m not going to be able to take it while I’m deployed for 365+ days in Iraq, so it would make sense for me to drain that balance as much as I can ahead of time. I would like to use this leave time–for my own relaxation apart from work, if nothing else.

However, I also have a deployment coming up that requires lots (and lots and lots) of running from office to office, getting check-boxes on paperwork checked, and initials from umpteen thousand different officials. We call this lovely procedure “out-processing” and it’s a horrid but ubiquitous part of being in the military. Similarly, when you arrive on station anywhere, you have to “in-process”, and do the same thing that you just finished upon leaving the last place.

However, though everyone knows that I have an upcoming deployment and that I will spend at least two weeks of the time before it doing this business of out-processing (more, actually, because some of the stuff has to be pre-ordered or you end up with nasty problems like boots that don’t fit and not having a hat for your uniform–which happened to me last time I did this), here’s how my pre-deployment has gone so far:

I signed the paper that said I accepted the deployment. (2 weeks after it was “due” because it got stuck in someone’s inbox on the way to me.) End of story.

Finally I called the people who are supposed to start this process and they said, “Oh, you need to talk to someone else–but they don’t like people to come in one at a time, so you’re going to have to wait until they have a mass briefing, only I don’t know when they have those briefings.”

Ahhh, life in the military.

Anyway, my point was: even though I know I want to take some time off, and I SHOULD take some time off (if only to get things ready for me to leave), it’s really hard to do it because I never know when someone’s going to call me and say, “Where are you? You’re supposed to be at this meeting that started an hour ago!”

My solution to date has been to schedule a couple weeks off for this month (it’s still a month or so before I’m a short-timer), and plan to stay at home/in the general vicinity of work just in case any of those especially short-notice things pop up. I know that sometime before I go, I’ll have a road trip up to Washington State, unless the military really decides to blindside me (for instance, with 6 weeks of newly-required training–it’s been known to happen, and out of the blue like that). I hope, though, that I’m going to be able to get my stuff moved out of my apartment and put in storage, and leave my car and pets with family, in a timely and mostly stress-free manner.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

(By the way, as luck has it, the person I talked to found the next scheduled time for a mass briefing, and it is–of course–set for the afternoon of the first day of my requested leave. Sigh.)