This week I have been out of the office in training. The training is pretty dry. JP went through this course last week, and when I saw him last Wednesday, I asked him how it was. His only response was: "Bring something to keep you awake." Banned from drinking Red Bull (by my husband who claims it will fuck up my kidneys), and armed with only one teabag's worth of Yogi Green Tea, what do you think I used to stay alert? My imagination, of course. Except in the rarest of instances (I am struggling to recall any just now), my imagination gets me out of tough scrapes, makes wrong turns right, frees me from mental torpor, and generally renders any ordinary situation just a little more silly. Most of the time I don't even think these thoughts on purpose. I am imaginatively hard of hearing and often reading. You've heard of people's minds playing tricks on them? Well mine has an involuntary gag reflex - of the humorous kind. Guess it has a thing for funny boners.
When my classmates at Nuke School or Department Head school would struggle to stay awake even after pounding liters of coffee/soda and getting plenty of sleep (by anyone's standards, not just a SWO's), I would attribute their sleepiness to having a weak mind; that they lacked imagination. When speakers just aren't holding my interest, I make things up either about them or I shamelessly misconstrue their words. Sometimes what I come up with just makes me go “hmmmm” and sometimes it just downright cracks me up – sometimes to the point where I draw attention to myself by excessively grinning, laughing, or even snorting apparently out of context. When I am trying to instill people with the confidence that I am one to be taken seriously, however, I can usually turn it off or tone it down to a simple simper. I never said that I was actually attentive, my imagination is just a mechanism to ward off the sleepiness that stems from boredom, just creating the illusion that I am paying attention.
ANYWAY, now that you have the background, I'll discuss what has transpired in class.
There are a number of tools on our intranet that never cease to crack me up. For instance:
- Wiki - derived from the worldwide web’s internet encyclopedia tool "wikipedia," it is our version of the same thing; when I read it or hear the word I hear it repeated four times, like in the 80's song "Jam On It": wiki wiki wiki wiki -- shut up! Jam through the night, then night turns to day, time is all I want to hear you say, jam on it, jam on it, I say ja ja ja ja jam on it...
- Portlets - sub sections of a web page that bring the user to another page or dropdown menu; my brain sees/hears "port-o-lets," you know, portopotties, honeybuckets, Portajohns; and whatever is in the new window or drop down menu makes me think of literally a selection for things that one may drop down a portolet or a new portal within the portolet, like in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. ...where does it go? Eeeeewww, gross.
- "We're going live!" - meaning we are on the same server/intranet as the rest of the building, as opposed to the training server. The instructor warns us by officially and dramatically shouting that phrase to let us know that we could potentially send one of our test messages/taskings to the Chairman (Admiral Mullen). While the ramifications of doing so do make me immaturely snicker, it's more the instructor's drama that cracks me up; for I picture him as Chris Elliott in Groundhog Day, standing behind a TV camera with his fingers in the air: "We're going live in three, two, one -- you're on the air!" And nothing seems changed: hello? We're still in this stultifying classroom.
- Dirty words - certain key words that the “Top Secret” Guard system looks for that prevent downgrading a file's classification. It’s obvious where one can go with this one… leaves us all wondering what those words are… literally, the military’s dirty little secrets!
- CHOD – stands for Chief of Defense (of another country); makes me think of Chode, a derogatory term that one of my Senior Chiefs on the destroyer used to use to describe someone whom he particularly despised and had no respect for. I am pretty sure I don’t even want to look up the true meaning of the slang. Still, it makes me sophomorically chuckle.
One of the first exercises we did in class was to create a test document that we later moved around to show how to transfer data between the various repositories and applications on our system. To do this, we were supposed to simply create a new Word document, write a test sentence like "STU014 test document" and save it. There was no one preventing me from writing something else, though. I knew I shouldn't write something off color (which I am almost ashamed to say was actually the first thing that came to mind – but consider the company I kept for the past 3.5 years on sea duty). And when I was an Ensign at SWOS many moons ago, I was counseled for typing "this is lame" in a test message exercise... I can still hear the pedantic Lieutenant, LT Monsour (“You couldn’t think of anything else to write… you need to improve your attitude blah blah blah blah!”) Instead, I wrote "My favorite way to eat pretzels is to stuff a lot of them into my mouth at once." This elicited a giggle from my classmate (and longtime friend) on my left. My shorthand description read "STU14's monograph for her preferred pretzel eating tactic." The best part came when in a later exercise we had to search the entire intranet for our file by keywords. When I entered the keyword "tactic," my document was second only to one about the Indian Army's new tank tactics. Hmmmm - a 75% match!
Later, we familiarized ourselves with some data spreadsheets we're supposed to use. One was called DART (Director's Action Response Tracker) and another was called CART (Chairman's Action Response Tracker). There was a third in the grouping that was unabbreviated: 4 star Action Response Tracker. Why don't they call it FART? Beats me.
One of our instructors was getting her ass kicked by malaprops too. So that too provided no small amount of amusement. For example, she told us to antiquate ourselves with a certain program, that she was going to flush out the details of somethingorother.
Have you ever noticed that if you have the "hand" selected in a PDF file and you hold your mouse on it and move it up and down really quickly, you can make it look like you are punching the page? For kicks, try doing it really fast.
There is one woman who works in the Training Center there who is actually a full professor. She used to teach writing at Rutgers. She talked of active voice, gerunds, properly placed participles, and the malice of common military redundancies like "at this time," "past history," and "advanced planning." Her words were music to my ears, and I was thoroughly impressed that our military had someone on the Staff. While she was giving her bio, I began to daydream about my days as a writing tutor in college. Atop of all this, both days, she has brought in the most amazing baked goods, too: muffins, cinnamon pound cake! And she pleasantly smiles and sweetly greets each and every person who comes into the classroom, carefully listening and maternally seeing that our every need is met while we are in her charge. She’s truly the Polygon’s Mom.
So she got up to teach us, and what do you think ran through my imagination. Well, since she actually knew how to instruct, knew how to speak, I was actually paying attention. She told us that here at the National Polygon we were breathing rarefied air. When we have those days when we get discouraged about what we are doing, she entreated us to remember the younger person who joined the military for noble reasons. If we should feel that the papers we're producing are just insignificant bureaucracy, remember there is a kid out there, a soldier, a sailor, an airman who is depending on what you write… because of the work you are doing here, you will be renewed as individuals.
Man, did I feel like crap for literally making a mockery of this class. I am such a SUCKER.
So, she taught her lesson, introduced us to the “family of forms” (which conjured images of Italians seated around a table full of spaghetti and meatballs). She knew how dry the material was and reached out to us in a very real way: “I feel your pain… in more ways than one… that’s why I bake.” Bless you lady, bless you.
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