iraqistan

Warrant officers can be amazing creatures. They are supposed to be technical experts… eventually… and appear to spend most of their time getting to that expert status daydreaming and finding other ways to occupy their time. This may, in fact, be what they are becoming expert at, I am not sure. I cannot become a warrant myself because I was told I cannot be forced to road march for 10 kilometers. This is because I have a doctor signature saying it is at the very least strongly advised against. They denied my waiver exactly one month after I completed my most recent 10 kilometer road march. They said that while I could do it, they could not force me to do it, and it was called a “forced road march” on the description of the activity, so I was counted out.

But I digress. If warrant officers are in fact trying to become technical experts at finding other ways to occupy their time, someone really ought consider the promotion status of some of the people I work with.

Just today I was sitting in my office and yelled a question to a nearby warrant officer, who sits around the corner. He yelled back an answer, but I had the window open and could not hear him over the roar of American muscle cars passing by. I yelled again to tell him I couldn’t hear him, but didn’t catch his response. Finally, when the light turned red outside, I mentioned offhand that we should just get some cups and string.

While prior to my interruption he had presumably been happily wandering his way around unrelated sites on the interwebs, this comment spurned action and motivation such as I have rarely seen in the Army.

His first quest was for cups. He found some, questioned if that was sugar or crystalized milk in one, and decided it was good enough. They were the last two disposable cups we had laying around, so he figured it was all meant to be.

He then tore apart the office looking for 5-50 cord, a strong and common rope used in the Army. I had just brought my coil home, so there was none. He went to another office to get some. No luck there, so he returned to continue turning our supply room upside-down in his quest.

He decided he would not rest until we had adequate means of communication via cups and string.

Actually, it turned out he would not rest until he either set up our new communications system or until he realized that a light bulb had burned out in my office. Whichever came first.

While looking for string, he came across a bulb. He observed that one of mine had burned out. Fascinated, he immediately stood on my desk and tried to install the light, which he could not get to work. In his mission, the cups fell from my desk where he had absently left them and onto a chair, which he subsequently used to get down from my desk while shaking the bulb to determine if it was the socket, the bulb, or him that was not quite functioning properly. When getting down, he stepped on the cups, breaking the last two potential earpieces that would not require a trip to the shoppette across the road.

He was devastated, having broken the cups and me still sitting in the partial darkness, until I handed him a Rubix Cube he had left in my office some days before and sent him back to his desk. I even had the forethought to ask him my question when I could hear a response before I left him there.

I am going to talk to the command about him getting promoted in advance. He is clearly ready.