I’m Free! Oh Wait…
This morning, in an effort to find out why the medical system here can only access my records from five years ago and not my present records, I found out that for the past few weeks I have tasted freedom and been unaware. Unfortunately, they fixed it.
I wandered by DEERS, which does enrollments for family members, ID cards for everyone, and so on. The theory was that the local folks never updated to my married name and that was the problem with the medical system. So I signed in, waited the usual half an hour or so for my name to be called, and within five minutes they determined that the error was not in their system because they had me in their system as my married name. Since this is the base where I made the name change, that made sense, so it was unexpected that it turned up properly as few things that make sense in the Army ever come to fruition. Regardless, they then pondered why I was having trouble accessing systems using my card, why the medical system had bumped me out, and so on. So they scanned my card to get some more information.
It turns out that no one ever updated my extension last October. Nor had my reenlistment processed yet. According to the information in the system, I should have left the Army on 14 May, the second of many potential escape dates, but not accurate for about seven months now. As a result of this, various systems had simply booted me, to include medical insurance, DEERS, and a few other related systems of which I am still mucking through. Technically, I could have wandered off about two weeks ago and few people would have actually noticed.
The main problem with this is that I didn’t know, particularly since my pay appears to have made it through unscathed somehow so I could have gotten two weeks paid vacation. I know the course I am in would have noticed, but the Army would have been hard pressed to do anything given their lack of knowledge that I was still a member of the uniformed services. Not like it would have worked, but a girl’s gotta dream.
The nice people at DEERS fixed what they could on their end of the system, which should fix most of it, and printed me off another ID card so I can try to function and do things like sign documents, a function critical to my unit. Unfortunately that also closed any slight crack in the door for the next three years… all views to freedom now blocked, so back to work I go.