August 10, 2006

• Nothing like a worthless, 14-hour workday to make you think about drinking yourself into a stupor.? Yesterday, around 1800, someone decided that an 0800 meeting would be a wonderful idea.? So my boss decides that we need to hash out some stuff at 0630.? Well, that killed the idea of doing PT, and eating breakfast.? I was stuck until 1030, with no sign of caffeine or food.? I perform some actual worthwhile work from 1100-1200, and 1200-1400.? After that, I might as well have been dead.?

  In fact, one piece of information that I've worked on, I've made so many variations of, that I have officially scrapped the original one, because the one that I created now, does a better job of being worthless than the other one does.? Let me simplify this piece of what I do.? I handle the budget, and we have money.? So I say, we have pizza.? And that the pizza has tomatoes, onions, yellow bell peppers, and chicken on it.? So I present this.

  This is good for a day or two, until I'm told that I need to present the exact same pizza, but with the toppings on a different slide.? So I do that.? Then the toppings need individual slides.? So I do that.? A few days later, they want the pizza shown sliced.? So I do that.? Then they want an additional presentation with the pizza cut into squares.? So I do that.? THEN they decide that hey also need the pizza cut into pentagons.? This is the point where I imagine killing people.

  So today's worthless task is to create a budget plan for the Battalions.? The original plan was to create a spending tracker.??? Certain things are designed so that there is a limit, such as the Government Purchase Cards (GPC).? Otherwise, they can do whatever the hell that they want with the money that I give them.? So there was a column called spent.? It's pretty obvious what that is for.? However, due to the items with restrictions (and there are maybe 2) there is another column called "allocated".? This creates a lot of empty space in the spreadsheet.? For some reason, it was decided that we needed to populate that space.?

  Now, let's say that we allocate a battalion $300,000 to spend in the next 2 months.? The GPC has a $5,000 a month limit, and they already purchased their unit coins.? Now, there are a bunch of other items, Class IX (expendable), Class VII (major end items), etc.? At the Brigade level, we have an idea what we would like to set aside for these areas (it's not set in stone).? I had to sit there, with a captain (the reason that I had to sit there, otherwise I would have left hours ago), and populate the spreadsheet with what each Batt would spend of what we gave them.

  The thing is, all?each Battalion commander sees is that they have $300,000.? They don't care what I put.? And I don't care, either.? Or all I care, they can buy cold beer and hot dicks.? All I'm going to do is say the amount that they spent so that we know what we have left overall.

  My day was so bad that I drove 90% of the way home and decided that I wanted beer, so I drove back to post with the idea of buying a case of Guinness.? Somehow, I calmed myself down enough to get 1 6-pack of Sam Adams and a 6 pack of Guinness.? I have almost decided not to drink and play video games, but I have the day off tomorrow, so I will.

  Oh, did I mention that I have to go in Sunday to go over this stupid spreadsheet with my boss and the captain.

  Black 6, out.

  • 4:15 pm
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