I had looked forward to a nice easy Friday night, drink a few beers, eat some dinner-maybe watch a movie. Then the phone rang:
“Listen, the leadership is going to be swamped with the rest of all the proposals that are due next week, you look like you are pretty far along-the VP wants to go over yours tomorrow at noon. Any problems?”
Well, I can think of more than a couple, I mean besides the fact that I loathe working on weekends:
Unfortunately, “no” was not really an option-especially when they might be looking to send people to the bread lines in a few months. And -to tell the truth- he really IS going to be swamped next week with proposals.
This is not going to end well.
This sounds like some of the classic lines from “Office Space” are being played in your real life there Skippy. I mean to have to come in on a Saturday to work on the TPS report, sucks.
But to balance it out, it could be worst; remember those days when you had to sacrifice a weekend to get an FCF or an FCLP done prior to det or the boat? Oh and by the way the Boxman is down sick so you have to cover his duty tomorrow, so no club for you?
Would you rather be forced to put in a tweleve hour day trying to get a couple of FCLP’s done with a suprise duty for the rest of the weekend or waste maybe even 8hrs to debate the merit of your proposal?
At least when I was standing the duty-or playing “stunt mole” during FCLP’s or an FCF, I thought I was accomplishing something.
So yea-sign me up for the oh dark thirty go. Sunrise from 20K feet is pretty awesome.
And besides-back in the day, at the end of your duty day you could retreat to the SDO bunkroom, which just happened to go right past the beer machine. Not that I would know beers were $0.75 you know-just saying…….. š
Ah, well I knew some family friends that just hated those weekends right before dets or deployment. You want family time and instead being forced to give up a Saturday or even Sunday night to get in one or two more FCLP’s. Or it was always some sort of sport playoff time (football, hockey, baseball, etc) and the big game was on just when the Ops O and the Maintenance O had scheduled a needed FCF.
As to the duty thing, I remember as a kid seeing the Barracks at Oceana with a beer vending machines and notes saying only 1 can per person. When I did walk arounds with my dad as the duty CPO for a couple of squadrons.
In the E-2 world you knew you were going to get a raw deal. Because we were a turbo-prop our FCLP periods were in the middle of the night-usually at 12:30am or later.
I don’t know how it worked in TACELRONS but we tried as hard as we could to get the last couple of days off before deployment. Being at NAS Norva-we tried to “pre-load” as much of the stuff as we could because we always got lousy spots on the load aboard.
But as you well know-Grumman aircraft can be fickle things. More than once our guys had to do an engine change before a deployment. The good thing was-if your sister squadrons were around they, would pitch in and help when they could, especially if you were going to get underway soon.