e-mail from a friend at a new command

Jessica,

Ah, the memories of battalion. I always felt that the engineering division was the most ridiculous branch. The hardest part of being in the Navy is often pretending to be busy when you're really not. The problem is that there are two types of people: the ones who truly are busy because they have horrible time-management skills and actually take three times longer than necessary to do the job and the ones who do the job and then have to pretend that they are stressed out so nobody creates stupid, mindless busywork for them. I hear rumors of a third group that is legitimately busy, but I swear to you that I haven't seen anyone who falls in that category.

And HAH! You think you know government waste? You don't know government waste! This command purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of repair parts for equipment that we don't even have. Did we turn it in for a refund? No, of course not. It was all stored in a 20 ft connex box for two years until I cracked it open a couple of months ago to see what the hell it was and then had no option but to throw everything away because it was all useless! When I first got here I was angry about the gross negligence, but now that the value of items that I have trashed has well exceeded $1M (and counting) I'm pretty much numb. After all, that doesn't even come close to the value of stuff that we've MISPLACED.

I guess that $12 BILLION a month has to go towards something...

The Time Has Come

I want out, now.

I have nothing to do. Or more honestly, and for the sake accuracy, I have about 3 hours of work a week, which under my analysis is dangerously close to nothing, and produces the same mental distress as nothing. Severe boredom isn’t good for kids, for dogs, or for me. Is there any other situation where I would be doing nothing day after day, getting paid for it, and yet it would be illegal to quit? Taxpayers, also known as my neighbors and relatives, month after month are paying me well over $3,000 to do nothing. And yet, the battalion runs out of photocopy paper at the end of every fiscal year.