Battle Royal

Things on base have been very busy. My supervisor is gone on R&R which leaves the environmental bulk of this 30,000 person base on me. To make things even more hectic there is a DCMA woman here on base who is giving my areas of operation at hard time. DCMA is the organization that keeps an eye on the contractors here. I wouldn’t mind if they were fair with there evaluations but they often make things up as they go, and state personal preferences as if they were written regulations. Not to mention their rank seems to be very connected to how many CARs (Corrective Action Reviews) they have given out.

This lady’s pet peeve seems to be chemical storage and environmental issues. She is also a self proclaimed “Environmentalist.” She has gone to all my sites and my coworkers and has been trying to turn things upside down. She is scaring the dickens out people by saying things like, “You can’t store Windex and Alkaline batteries in the same building, and they are not compatible. One is a flammable and one is a corrosive.”

I have been pouring over Army, Air Force, OSHA, and KBR regulations gathering information to help “battle” this lady. She is just making things up as she goes, but I have to have the hard “black and white” to show her that she is wrong. It has been four, twelve hour days trying to prepare for her next oddball comments. And it turns out she has been making things up as she goes and using regulations that do not apply to get her personal opinion across.

What makes it a little harder is that I have to do this all myself because my coworkers here don’t know how to read the army regulations. I’m pretty sure they have never even opened them.

It hasn’t been that bad though, there are a lot of good things about this “battle royal.” For one, it forces me to become better acclimated to the nitpicky info in the regulations which will help me in the future. It also makes the day go by fast. I don’t seem to have enough time in a day anymore. I am also proving myself to the bosses. They get to see who really knows what they are doing, and who is just riding the clock. Finally, it is kind of fun. It is like a game to see who can top the other in nerdy regulation battle.

“…O YEAH?!? Well how bout you look in OSHA 1910.106 of Subpart H, and tell me that isn’t the correct way to store flammables.”

“Well well, that isn’t what TM38-410 Chapter 4 part 4.20 says, where are you getting that information from?”

“How about you go look at DLAI 4145.11 figure 6-3 and then tell me that I am wrong? Then take that clipboard, turn it sideways and shove it up.……”

Well in any case, stuff like this keeps me busy, even if it turns my head to mush. It can also be kind of fun and funny sometimes.

Haven’t had a lot of time to take photos, so I added a funny poster I found online.