Navy-Civilian Transition Story
2 years. It's been almost 2 years since the last blog entry made in September of 2007.
1 month after the last entry, I retired from the United States Navy after I forgot how many million years of doing all sorts of things that I mostly liked. None of those things had anything to do with going to sea in ships.
I've often wondered how many (or how to find other) 20+ year retired CPOs in the U.S. Navy never were assigned to a ship ... it seems kinda strange, doesn't it?
So there I was -- an accidental accomplished overseas shorefare specialist both ignored and inadvertently rewarded by an institution that would not exist if not for the totally hostile environment in which thousands of American men and women have been and continue to be floating around waiting for a justified reason to exhibit their prowess at killing people and breaking things and giving rise to all sorts of things from happy or hateful and discontented headlines to entirely new governments, including one in my own country!
But I didn't get to do that. The most time I ever spent on a ship wasn't even racked up on one of ours. But I'm pretty proud of the hours I spent stuck on a South Korean destroyer (about as big as McHale's Pt-53, as I recall). My becoming an overseas shorefare specialist had it's advantages, however. I quickly learned to culture-shift and learned to accept that people are different in different parts of the world. More people should understand this. I think most people who think they do haven't ever left their own. If they have and still don't "get it," I'd be willing to be the shirt you're wearing right now that those particular people are, as a group, just stupid. A disproportionately large number of that group is also alcoholic or has alcoholism somewhere in they're family tree.
So I decided to "go with what I know," as a understatedly wise former colleague once advised me and remained overseas.
1 month after retiring, I was offered and accepted a position with a DoD contractor responsible for maintaining a portion of the IT network and various services for the dysfunctional computers and telecommunications command that had driven my colleagues and I crazy for at least the past 5 years. Prior to that, I had only heard of the place in the horror stories of young Sailors who had been sentenced to serve there (also called training) by other commands in the dysfunctional network.
1 month after being hired (not paid, just "hired"), on the Thursday before the Monday I was to begin working, I received a long-distance phonecall from the DoD contractor's head of personnel.
"We have a problem with your clearance," he said. "You don't have one."
I will spend some more time on properly relating the next 4 months before posting the next entry concerning it. I believe it necessary to sanitize the story to ensure all references to actual names and places are removed so as not to embarrass any of the total freaking idiots involved.
