How Did I Get Here?

Thursday

(OK, cheesy way to get a pic of Cindy Crawford in the post. So!)

Being a computer geek, you would think that I would embrace this Marine Online (MOL) concept. I mean, on paper, it looks great. All the administration is now pretty much automated and online and I can sit at my computer all day and administer my Company from behind my desk. Did you catch the problem there?

I am a self-confessed geek and even I can see that this is a problem.

There are some advantages, of course, but the learning curve is a little steep. I got my first taste of this when my First Sergeant who self-admittedly can hardly SPELL computer, was walking me through the promotion recommendations today.

“Click there, Sir. Now check those, Sir. OK, now uncheck that one and that one, Sir. Then hit submit and it will kick you out and my name will still be on there so you have to set the command reqs….”

And on and on and on.

Do you know how humbling it is to have a Luddite walk you through a confusing set of computer progression?

I guess I’ll eventually catch on but I have to be careful. See, I have the power to promote or deny. Actually, I give my recommendation to the Colonel who has that power but seeing that he is one more level removed from the Marines than I am, he has to depend on me to know my Marines. If I don’t recommend, I have to justify and it can’t be “This Marine’s a doo-doo head.”

Other things I can do on MOL? Well, I can approve leave. What does this mean? It means that the most junior Private can send me a request and I have to take the time to review his papers and electronically sign off on it.

What? You say that it seems weird that I have to sign off on ALL the leave? That the Company Commander is tasked with looking at every detail of the leave and has to go in and sign off on it?

It’s not quite as bad as that since the First Sergeant can go in and do it but in the old days, these functions were delegated farther down the chain so the Company Commander wasn’t swatting gnats like approving every leave request and could concentrate on stuff like, I don’t know, creating policy and leading the Company. I know, I’m a relic.

What makes things worse is that many times, MOL is either down or really slow. Or even worse, you do some amount of work on it and then it bombs out. And you just can’t leave it open all day. If you let it sit idle for, oh, say 2 minutes, you have to log back in which takes longer than the idle time.

OK, so I can do promotion recommendations, proficiency/conduct marks, leave, and get all kinds of reports off of MOL but there are just as many bugs in it as there are useful functionality. I have to live with this and invest in it since it’s been dictated as our bread and butter.

Just like taking a shit, the job ain’t done until the paperwork is finished and your ass gets pretty sore wiping it with a keyboard.

Free Advice for Today: “Be open and accessible. The next person you meet could become your best friend.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 27th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.