2 Months In

2 Months in and gong strong. As you noticed I did not blog last week. Not really much to report. This past week was pretty busy since I was a one man show in my section for a bit. My NCO came back 2 days ago and things are starting to slow down again. I am very thankful to have such a hard worker and we get along great.

I will give you some insight on how the military office environment works though. This is one reason I could never be active duty military. The general military population, has no concept of civilian industry practices that save money and time (LEAN, Six Sigma, Project Mangement), which drives me nuts knowing these are tax payer dollars and they are wasted due to lack of knowledge, education and the prevailing culture. For example, this is one thing I am dealing with right now. We have a bank of printers that people use here in our office that I am responsible to keep up and running being the IT guy. No one will send documents electronically for review, they have to print full page, full color, single sided copies for others to look at.

So this is where I come in and bring things out of the 1980's to keep my insanity. I plan to put all the printers on a print server, so I can control how things are printed from my computer by controlling the default settings. Meaning, all prints will default to black and white, and double sided. This will save on color toner costs and paper consumptions. And I will also be able to delete stuff that is backlogged in the printer queue. I am becoming the IT natzy and I understand why others do as well. They all know this is coming very soon, and the commander is 100% behind it, I am sure of that. I am trying to convert folks to use the network that is available to them to share files electronically and show them the benefits. A similar thing was implemented at my work back home, and was estimated it would save us millions on paper costs. The savings won't be that big here, but it will make a dent in my sanity. Imagine what the tax payer dollar savings would be if we could implement this across the Army? Problem is each Army unit is like a different company in the civilian world. They all do things differently.

Here is another tid bit. The division that has been running the show here for the past year has just left and turned the operations over to a new division. You would think this is no big deal, they just take over right, wrong. They have their own identity so signs have to be changed, computer naming conventions have to be changed, any and everything that had the old divisions stamp on it now has to have the new divisions identity. Instead of setting everything up to be generic to the unit that is running the show to again, save money, a lot of unnecessary time and money is spent making these changes to preserve the individual unit's identity. If this were a company they would be out of business by now. There is a saying out there, "We fight the same ware one year at a time." As this happens every year.

Just thought I might provide you with a little insight into my current situation. I am working at getting on "Aghan Time", I think it is kind of like "Island Time." Nothing moves very fast around here, that is for sure and I think I am dealing with a little bit of culture shock believe it or not.

Until next time, TTFN!