Survey Says

Today I took a ‘random’ survey sent out by PACAF (Pacific Air Force for those of you who don’t know). It was about my training and what we could do to improve upon it. I answered the questions to the best of my ability and finally came to the last section: ‘If you would like to make a suggestion or have any further comments please write them in the area below.’

Oh, ok. I can do that. There are many improvements to be made, and I will certainly help you out. Don’t worry,

Air Command, I got you.

I started with basics about what we learned in tech school and what we actually use. A lot of the stuff we learned is obsolete and most of our leadership doesn’t understand my job anyway. Our CDCs looked like they scraped up enough information to get by with rather than creating an actual form of guidance for us to reference. Our on the job training was the only actual instruction we receive. But it wasn’t good enough to stop there. There were parts of my career that don’t make sense in certain squadrons, better bring that up too. And while we’re at it we should probably throw something in there about people full-heartedly believing that we are magicians and can drop everything to look at their computer because it will ‘just take a second’. Bitch, Work. Do you go to it?

I spent a good hour and half typing, spell checking and re-reading my ‘suggestions’. It flowed gracefully. It lacked most of my sass and came across professional. I was quite proud of it. After my sixth or seventh read through I decided this was as good as it was going to get.

That is when the fateful moment came to hit ‘submit’.

Then I got a wonderful little error message that read: “your comment exceeds 200 characters in length.”

What? CHARACTERS? Not 200 words (this was about 600 words). 200 CHARACTERS. That means punctuation and spaces are being counted.

You mean to tell me that you just let me type a damn essay into your stupid little comment box and didn’t warn me that there was a limit? You know what Air Force, you’re a bastard. You don’t care what I have to say. You don’t want instruction on how to improve. What you want is a standardized ass-kiss annually. That isn’t my game. I don’t play that shit.

I deleted my beautiful work and replaced it with this: “Stop wasting valuable time with surveys. I’m an airman who does 9 different programs with no help because you can’t decide what my job is. I’d love to chat, but as I said, I need to get back to work. Must be nice to have an automated system do it for me.”

Most of my ire died out after lunch, but its a damn shame that I couldn’t send that in. Oh well, cei la vie.

-Bug