I have no idea what it is, much less how to pull it.
Every morning, the Group Staff would meet for the morning brief, gathering in a circle so each of us could speak in turn. It was a meeting of the minds, a brainstorming session, a Gathering in a Great Circle, all rolled into one. With this meeting we were expected to set the agenda for the day and exchange information. Colonel Carney would go first. Being the Group Staff commander, she would read the day’s calendar of events and pepper us with tasks, and when she was done she would turn her laser-like peepers on each of us and expect us to update the rest of the staff on what was happening in our areas of responsibility.
I was responsible for ordering, maintaining and taking inventory of the group’s supply needs, and ensuring that the group’s vehicle fleet was properly maintained and ready for use. If that sounds a bit grand, you should know that supplying the group consisted mainly of ordering pencils and cleaning supplies, requesting funds for special purchases like flags for visiting dignitaries, and working with Sergeant Li, the finance guru, to make sure the group’s allocated funds for supplies got spent.
Actually, that last one was kind of impressive, if you’re impressed by bureaucracy. If we didn’t spend every last cent of our budget by the end of the fiscal year, the next year our allotment would be reduced. We couldn’t buy a ton of copier paper and stockpile it, because it was expressly forbidden that we stockpile supplies. So, at the end of the year, each department would send me a wish list of items they suddenly had a requirement for. One department discovered they had an immediate requirement for three wide-screen plasma computer monitors. Another department required a dozen ten-channel walkie-talkies. I would review these wish lists with Sergeant Li, figure out what we could buy with the money we had left, and put in an order, usually at five o’clock on the last day of the last quarter of the fiscal year. Suddenly.
Spending all the money wasn’t hard. I’ve heard people say, It must be hard to spend a million dollars, but it’s not. A real challenge, I can tell you from experience, is making sure you have toner cartridges for dozens of different printers in offices all over a building big enough to hold an Air Force group. Just making sure the printers in the group headquarters building alone were always churning out readable printed matter was a challenge. Although the military strives to organize itself as efficiently as possible, each office in the group headquarters building had its own printer, ordering not a single, uniform make and model but whatever they wanted … no, sorry, what they required. Some required a printer that could print on both sides of the paper. Some required a printer with more than one paper source tray. Some required a printer that was also a fax machine, or a copier. Whatever the reason, the result was that I had to buy thousands of dollars worth of toner cartridges every week just to make sure we always had replacement cartridges on hand for each and every printer, because those printers were popping out briefings and spread sheets by line officers who had to present them to the group commander yesterday, and if couldn’t produce a replacement instantly I had to drive to the main base depot and get one. Really. That one challenge right there kept me up nights.
The group’s vehicle fleet was easy to maintain. It consisted of four miniature pickup trucks so small that they were known to everyone as scooters. The cabs were just big enough for two people to sit hip to hip. One of the scooters was so small I literally had to step into it like a pair of pants, inserting my left leg to the left side of the steering column, sitting down, then drawing my right leg in. If I sat down first, there was no getting my left leg around the steering column. I tried several times, contorting my legs into a different shape each time, just to see if I could do it, but the geometry of the available space under the steering wheel wouldn’t allow it. The vehicle was made to max out the bed behind the cab so it could carry as much as possible, which is to say not much. I could pile a week’s supply of paper towels and toner cartridges in the back, throw a few cleaning supplies on top, and that was about it.
None of this was so important that I had to tell the rest of the staff about it every morning, so I tried to keep my contribution to the brief as short as possible. Even if there had been something unusual coming up, I would have only bored everyone to tears if I’d forced upon them the details of weekly vehicle inspections and trips to the warehouse, so most times my contribution would be, “I got nothing.” Amazingly, Colonel Carney seemed okay with this. I tried it only after I heard somebody else use it, but once we’d established that this was acceptable, I burped out “I got nothing” all the time, except in the unusual event, once or twice a year, that I really had something of note to report. The biggest downside to this technique was, I tended to get a lot of what we called drive-by tasking.
One morning, for instance, when it came Chief Hurlyburly’s turn to toss his contribution into the Great Circle, he flashed his winning smile at me and asked me to go visit TSgt Wiener to “find out what his comfort level was” regarding the Group picnic, scheduled to take place that Friday. TSgt Wiener was in charge of planning the group picnic: Securing a venue, booking the caterer, fetching plenty of balls and bats for us to play with, maybe arranging for a DJ to come play some tunes. The chief, still smiling expectantly at me, said he wanted me “to flex my senior NCO muscle” for this drive-by task.
For at least one or two minutes, I honestly thought he was putting me on. Flex my senior NCO muscle? That sounds a little like the punchline of a dirty joke, doesn’t it? And what, exactly, did he want me to ask TSgt Wiener? Was I truly supposed to walk into the sergeant’s office and drivel out some banality like, Say, TSgt Wiener, I understand you’ve got the task of planning the group picnic this weekend and I was wondering what your comfort level is on that? And as I tried to imagine how I myself would respond to that question, for a few more really terrifying minutes, as the morning meeting came to a close, I began to realize that the chief really, truly wanted me to ask TSgt Wiener something and I had no idea what it was. Comfort level? My response to that, in my imagination, would have been Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, chief? (You can make any three-letter abbreviation sound military if you use the phonetic alphabet.) Did he want me to make sure that Wiener’s plans were going well? That he had any plans at all? Or did he want to me bring Wiener a hot glass of milk, tuck him in and kiss him nite-nite? I had no clue.
Chiefs are some of the most notoriously vague NCOs in the military. They speak a dialect of managerial obfuscation that is often so obtuse as to be all but impenetrable. Pickle away with your most powerful rocket-propelled bunker-buster bombs. A chief’s response to the most direct question you can muster will likely result in a shower of more gobbledegook. I had no choice in my case, though. Any clue, any at all, would be a bone with more gristle on it than comfort level. After the meeting, I tagged along behind Chief Hurlyburly as he headed for his office. “Excuse me, chief,” I said, cornering him behind his desk, “I wonder if you could clarify just what, exactly, you wanted me to ask TSgt Wiener?”
“Just try to find out what his comfort level is regarding his plans for the picnic,” he repeated, as if he were stating the obvious. Then, perhaps seeing that I was not on his wavelength yet, he expanded a bit on his request: “Is he taking the initiative? I just want to be assured he’s on top of things.” That’s a chief’s idea of an illuminating dialog. This is not a verbatim transcript of what he said, I’ll admit, but I think I’ve come pretty close to capturing the essence of his request, clarification and all. Flexing my NCO muscle, I was supposed to test Wiener’s initiative to make sure he was on top of things, but above all I should establish Wiener’s comfort level. Well, that certainly cleared that up. “Okay, chief,” I said, backing away slowly and trying not to make any sudden moves that might cause further eruption of enigmatic and confusing phrases. “Thanks.”
This is a prime example of why I was never going to make a good senior NCO in the military. I could function just fine as a techie, yanking bits of info out of the ether and entering them into planet-sized data bases, but I still didn’t know what I was going to ask TSgt Wiener when I caught up with him. If I could talk in that senior NCO dialect that let me stand with my toes right on the edge of being confusing, I probably could have wrung a reply out of TSgt Wiener that would have satisfied Chief Hurlyburly, but I never developed that muscle. I didn’t know what stretch to do that would unlimber it, or which Nautilus machine would bulk it up. It wasn’t that my senior NCO muscle was flabby – it was vestigial.
When I caught up with TSgt Wiener outside his office later that day, I just shot from the hip and hoped to hit something. It didn’t go well. I went wide of the mark, by quite a wide margin. It would’ve turned out the same no matter how many pot shots I took. “With regard to the group picnic,” I began, and then didn’t really know where to go from there. TSgt Weiner sat waiting. “… the chief would like to know … ah … what your … plans are.” Wow, did that sound dumb, or did that sound dumb? What kind of plans would he have? Out of desperation, I almost wanted to blurt out more, maybe stick the words “comfort level” in there somewhere, just to sound a little more managerial, but I didn’t, and thank Christ for that.
Such a look he gave me. If he were any more puzzled, little jigsaw lines would have run helter-skelter across his face. He waited a couple beats, probably for me to ask a more substantial question, but when it became obvious that I had nothing more to add he told me that he’d already secured the park for our picnic, and a hangar, just in case the weather turned bad. A private caterer would provide the burgers and franks, and he’d picked up a bag of balls and bats from MWR that very morning. He was very comfortable with the plans he’d made for the group picnic. Everything’s been taken care of, stupid, was his message to me. He didn’t say stupid out loud, just with his eyes, sort of like I would’ve done if a senior NCO had asked me a question as vague and meaningless as the one I’d just put to him.
If asking TSgt Wiener whether or not he had been sharp enough to book a location for the group picnic was not enough to make me feel like a great big lummox, going back to the chief to report that I had done it made me feel doubly dumb. The chief, though, was pleased as punch with the comfort level TSgt Wiener had apparently achieved, and thanked me profusely for so expertly flexing my NCO muscle, whichever one that is.