Personal Journal

My Job - and men of honor

I have never before really written here of how unnecessary I am as an employee in my capacity as tiny little tooth on one of the cogs of the great military-industrial complex.

My job is completely without meaning or merit.

I am an editor of reports that mean little or nothing, which the Air Force places almost no emphasis upon. Of the reports I am required to process, there are 11 per year. Each has 3 iterations, and I can finish all but the last iteration in under a day. I stretch those out to a week long, surf the internet, make smalltalk, and sometimes - often in fact, write in various capacities. The "long" iteration I generally make take 2 weeks, because it's on a 20-day timetable. I can usually finish it in 2 or 3 days.

I work for the subcontractor - our division is all made up of my empoyer, L3 Communications, and in our subcontract role, we handle documentation, drafting, and maybe some other crap. Oh, book-keeping, essentially, of lots of meaningless changes to documentation. We're like librarians of obscene minutia.

However, a very few of us subcontractors are actually directly assigned to cover a part for the main contractor - Honeywell. Usually because it involves our focus as mentioned, and the people in that portion of Honeywell have proved extremely difficult or incompetent (it's actually usually both more than one or the other).

I was one such employee - directly assigned to Honeywell's "Maintenance" division. By maintenance, I don't mean facilities. I mean a division of people who actually do stuff.
They travel the globe year-round and keep the 11 stations that track Air Force satellites up and running, the implement new features, and they basically are the only essential element. Engineering is actually secondary, because it's one thing to design new stuff for our stations, but the stuff that's already on site has got to be kept operational always.

So instead of being in the cubicle farms of my actual "departmental colleagues" I work for "the customer".
It just so happens that I fit in beautifully with the Maintenance people and I find my own co-workers somewhat tedious and myopic. Also, a part of me that respects doing over tracking finds being a team member with the doers is infinitely better for my soul than the trackers.

The folks there are mostly ex-military, and many retired military (especially in leadership). I think of them as "my" department, though technically that's untrue. They recognize me as one of them, particularly in light of my spending 3 months on the road with them during the last Fall. I was a doer myself, and I earned a lot of respect for that. Now, as the main workforce in Maintenance is mostly ex-military, they are very knolwedgeable on the site equipment - it's what they did when they were in the military.

But they are painfully bad writers. Fortunately, most of their terrible literacy stems from a lack of priority it represents to them. However a few are generally illiterate.

Nevertheless, I'm painfully underworked, to the point where my identity will likely be shaken by it. I used to be much more active - prior to contract turnover. During contract turnover, certain jobs were taken by people actually permanently stationed at the sites, as opposed to our people who travel them all.

In the days prior to contract turnover, I was worked consistently to be pleased with my job. And, as fate would have it, I found myself at the right place at the right time, and my skills mattered, and I impressed a few people.

Two of the people I impressed were the division manager, and deputy manager (a good two to affect, I suppose). I made many friends, as well. It is these two men of whom I wish to speak.