As suspected, the Army seems to be having a little trouble with the tracking chip put into my neck sometime during basic training. That thing must malfunction an awful lot, because as soon as I leave a unit for a little while everything goes a bit haywire. I really ought get the batteries checked.
After a conversation with my First Sergeant, who is well aware of where I am and what is going on and even provides fun suggestions for hotspots in Fayetteville though really I’m not sure I want to or should be attending some of those clubs, it was finally decided that I find a finance office down here and try to straighten out at least some of this travel fiasco. My trip was supposed to be straightforward: Head from Germany to the States, take a class, head back, deal with Xenu later. Instead it turned into head from Germany to the States, get shuffled around, get on different orders to Walter Reed which were supposed to actually send me back to the class after six days even though I was still in the hospital on the day those orders ran out, try to fix those orders which still hasn’t happened, stick around Walter Reed for longer than expected because the pickling solution in my brain was off, head out on unpaid convalescent leave, and I still have yet to head back to Walter Reed and then, eventually, to Germany, to return to finish the class at a time still undetermined but hopefully in November when we can have all this fun again.
What makes it more confusing, as always, is automation. Part of the travel is accounted for on an automated, new, improved, and thoroughly useless travel system. The Walter Reed portion will be accounted for with the old paper system. The leave isn’t accounted for much of anywhere. The flights, which have to be rescheduled, are on the automated part. My government card is out of money and somehow I need to fix that.
So my first sergeant said to head to finance. They got confused and sent me to their headquarters. Their headquarters got confused and told me to go see people in inprocessing. Inprocessing said I don’t belong there and sent me to the main area for the automated system in the hopes that at least I can clear up a little piece of this, which is really all I wanted to do in the first place.
An hour and a half of sitting with the poor lady, who was all by herself today as her collegues were all in training, of course, finally got it to where it “should” be fixed to where I “should” get a partial payment.
“Should” is probably one of the scariest words in the Army. At least if someone is shooting at you, you know what to do, where to be, and which end of the metal boomstick is dangerous. With “Should,” particularly in the context of anything dealing with Army finance, it probably means more along the lines of “I don’t know, but you are probably going to end up worse off then when you came in here.” It means no one knows anything, where they are, where you are, where you are supposed to be, and they certainly have no idea which end of anything is dangerous.
So I let my first sergeant know that at least it “should” be fixed in the hopes that he can work some sort of crazy magic and make something appear on my govermnent card so I don’t have to sleep on the street when I head back to Walter Reed. Goodness knows I can’t walk back in that poor lady’s office or she might try to bludgeon me with the random pieces of pottery and wooden sculpture sitting on her windowsill. I think she considered it once or twice while I was trying to explain to her that all I needed was payment for a rental car and a hotel out in Arizona and I would leave her alone and work out the rest when I got back to Germany, while she was trying to figure out how I ended up at Fort Bragg. I tried to explain that seems to happen a lot recently, but she was busy muttering something and clicking on a lot of little dots trying to make sure I got paid for something somewhere so I didn’t want to interrupt much.
But in all likelihood, my command can figure out something. They should, anyway…