OUCH!

Will hasn't even left the states yet and they are already taking under-utilized body parts from him! Wednesday he will end the day with 4 fewer wisdom teeth from what he woke up with. Fortunately the Marines are kind enough to allow for a tiny bit of recovery time.

Since I haven't heard too many stories about the wonderful memories of the removal / recovery, I shall keep my fingers crossed for an easy removal and fast recovery.

PS - Any Marine at Camp Lejeune want to do good dead? Will is going to need a Dairy Queen Blizzard or a Steak and Shake milkshake delivered. I'll owe you one! :)

3rd week in Lejeune

Saturday morning after payday on a Marine Corps base. It is very calm and serene. I am in "boots and utes" (boots-an-youtes)which is a slang term for uniform minus cammie blouse. I am going on a short 2.5 - 3 mile run with one of the guys here. He needs some extra running.

After reorganizing the shop for the 3rd time in as many weeks, apparently I am in the S & R section, Shipping and Recieving. We are the backbone of the shop, gear comes in paper work is tracked. We are inventory control for all the sections.

There was a flak jacket class for a small group of us this week when we were issued the new and improved flak jacket. Flak jacket = armor worn to protect Marines from bursting amunitions such as grenade shrapnel and small arms fire upto 9 mm. They put metal plates in it to protect us from rifle rounds, all complete it's about a 25 lb vest. We received our jackets from supply and after dumping the contents out on the floor, we noticed there was about 15 pieces to this contraption. Yeah not a big fan of lots of little pieces to keep up with. 3 hours later we have a completed flak jacket with all the little pieces attached.

Mailing Address

While in Lejeune here is my mailing address

Cpl Ellis William F
2nd Supply BN 2nd MLG Maint CO 3rd PLT
PSC 20128 Camp Lejeune NC 28542

Spreadsheet...Database...its all the same

Apparently in the Marine Corps a spreadsheet is a database. Sometimes even a database is really just a fancy spreadsheet. You really don't correct officers when they tell you they have this wonderful database that someone made for them that tracks all this information and then when you look at the icons on their screen its just a link to an .xls file (for all you in non-geek land that is an excel file). You smile and go "wow sir, I can see where that would help you". All the while you are looking for a quick exit because the project that normally would take 4 days has been promised in 2.

Another common misconception is that just because you task a Private to type the data in your "database". Doesn't mean he/she really cared about what went in it. I kid you not, Alex had a database, errr umm a spreadsheet, where the PFC "guessed" what the social security number that was written on the paper was. We won't go into the correct course of action for the Marine to follow (it includes looking up on the computer what the correct soc # is, in one of the other 300 spreadsheets). At least he highlighted in orange the cell to let us know he "guessed" at the value. OnePurdue would be proud of his color choices!