Shenanigans at RSOI

Well, it's happened again. No posts for almost a week, then Jessica and I hit you with back to back posts. Whammy! That's why this blog brings "the ruckus".

I'm still at an undisclosed location on the Korean peninsula, involved in a massive Army staff exercise. We're supposed to wrap up at the end of this week, but let's all hope for an early end to this misery. There's not a lot of things to get excited about during a staff exercise. There's very little "real world" pieces moving around out there; the vast majority of activity takes place in a giant computer simulation where "puckers" move little computerized tanks and troops around on a artificial battlefield. They're called "puckers" because they don't use a mouse, they use a "puck" which is like the controller that drafters use in CAD. Why it's called a puck, I don't know.

Anyway, the majority of my time here has been spent receiving requests to send fake helicopters to imaginary troops and deliver imaginary supplies. The real kick in the teeth is when you start to feel a sense of accomplishment because you got your fake request in the fastest and "made the mission happen". There is no mission. The order gets signed and a "pucker" moves a computer icon from one place to another. Hooray!

The nuttiest thing I saw during these two weeks of aggravation had to be the "Classified Three-hole Punch". There's an office across from ours in the compound that has three hole-punches sitting on a table next to each other. They're identical except that they're each painted a different color: industrial grey, bright blue, and deep red. It took me a second to realize what I was looking at. These were for punching holes in documents of different levels of classification. The grey was for unclassified, blue for classified, and red for secret. I guess that they didn't want the tiny little secret paper dots getting mixed up with the tiny little unclassified paper dots and making their way into the trash where a dastardly North Korean could find them and piece together something from that one letter "R" that he found. Of course it begs the question, how would he be able to discern the secret paper dots from the unclassified paper dots? I guess those guys are just that good.