A funny problem

Last week I was called into our Personnel section in order to work on the paperwork for my Permanent Change of Station. En Route I should be heading to a course in Texas. The course starts one day before I am supposed to leave Korea leaving me in a pickle. But fortunately we have a fix for that called a curtailment but I was told I needed my Request for orders amended to include the course in order to process the curtailment. I sent a message to my human resources manager and he replied in short order that he needed my curtailment to process the RFO. Does anyone else see the problem here?!!!!

Just thought I'd share that funny story.

Oh by the way happy Columbus Day! To celebrate the day anyone with the name beginning in Chris get's to eat free at the Mustang Club on Osan! Wooo!

I'm baaaack! Not really

I like my extended abscences, they mean I have my wife with me and we're doing stuff. Life is going extremely well (knock on wood) so far with all the challenges that I encounter on a regular basis we seem to be working through them rather quickly. I think I have a very good team both at home and at work which makes life pretty easy. There are many times when long hours occur but it's more a matter of hurry up and wait than anything. Then there are days like today.

I've had a number of ongoing projects and one extremely big project which I have taken on. It's a pain when you work really hard to get a product out before vacation and then upon return you find out that it was stopped dead in it's tracks during the staffing phase. I have been working on a huge program which is brand new to Korea and we've been authorized to take it penninsula wide. The project is a Quarterly Leadership Health Fitness Forum, you could shorten it to health breakfast but that wouldn't sound as good. In any case it's a program designed for community leaders in each area to get together over breakfast and have a topic based discussion and hopefully get some good ideas out of it. This seems like a good idea but the execution is always a challenge. It takes writing a rock solid document which will hopefully stand the test of time leading to an ongoing program for years to come and perhaps even be the template for other commands to adopt a similar program if it is successful. That's why it got bogged down in staffing because although I'm a pretty good military writer, I lack many years of experience on those who are not only senior ranking but work in the orders area all the time. So I sent the document which I thought was pretty good up but alas it wasn't good enough. It came back and I made corrections. I did this three times before vacation and then submitted it to be published. Fortunately, the publisher read through it and found even more things which would make it better, unfortunately I was on leave while that happened. With an already short timetable, a two week break in the development process is enormous, it brought the issue from an ok timetable to a holy crap we've got to get this done quick. But the good news is that after working with the publisher, we have a very easy, almost paint by numbers document so execution should not be a problem. Finally, after almost 3 months of work on this project since it's inception until now, I have gotten the document published and now all we have to do is execute. Some would say I bit off more than we could chew but I think we're just doing the right thing. It's big but it's right.

So far the uptake on it has been extremely positive. As a matter of fact I spoke with an individual today while I was planning one of the events who was dreaming as big as I am about it. She also happens to be a Garrison commander's wife so my push seems to have hit the right ears. During our discussion, she was wondering (as I have in the past) why this hasn't been done before now. The answer is probably that no one had bothered to put in the effort.

In three weeks we get to test the waters. I'm prediciting a great turnout and a great event.

Oh back to continuing my earlier thought. Days like today. I had about 5 missions going at once for the last couple of weeks. I was somehow able to complete all 5 at about the same time this morning. I looked up at my screen and I said to myself, ok what now. I had practically run out. So I called Karly to tell her the good news and of course she reminded me of another mission and then I remembered another short deadline which had been pushed off due to the 5 more important issues.