Another Day in Paradise

Happy Fourth of July everybody! I'm on day 5 of my deployment--only some 55 odd more to go. They're breaking up the monotony with a BBQ.

I'm currently taking malaria pills and they're making me feel like crap. I asked about the other version of pills and was told by the flight doc that they can be worse due to the fact that they have hallucenogenic properties.

Right now I'm working with an airman who spends every second at work and every second of his free time padding his resume for the next 40 years. In the last year I've worked with him, he's openly stated how he expects to get BTZ and how all the stuff he's doing is fodder for his BTZ package. He's also constantly working on stuff to fill up quarterly awards and star performer packages. I finally told him to put a lid on it because he was overplaying his hand and it was obnoxious.

I don't have a problem with people who are true go-getters, but I wonder how much he'd be motivated to do if he thought he wasn't going to get something out of it.

The guy is very smart and knowledgable when it comes to retaining information. However, his assessments aren't always on target, offering constructive criticism sends him into a tailspin, and he tends to be condescending to people he perceives as less knowledgable than he.

The thing is, I'd rather have an airman that doesn't have a crapload of knowledge stored in his head, but doesn't treat other people like dirt and doesn't brief like he thinks his audience is stupid. I guess I'm a little biased though. In my OTS flight, we had a glut of prior enlisted individuals. Two in particular had a combined 20 years of experience between them and they didn't mind letting us non-priors know what a bunch of idiots they thought we were. One of them was my roommate--the Sluggo to my Mr. Bill. She was extremely good at telling the instructors what they wanted to hear. She would spout off the Core Values in class like she looked at them on a sticky note on her bathroom mirror everyday to make sure she memorized them. She also lied, backstabbed, sweet-talked FTOs in one breath and badmouthed them in the next, and was banging guys like a screen door in a hurricane (incidentally, she was married). And what do you suppose became of her? Well, she got Distinguished Graduate (DG) of course. Now she's attending AF Weapons School at Nellis, where she can hone her character flaws in a supportive and nurturing environment. I'd like to make it to the top as much as anybody, but I don't want to be the kind of O-6 that people avoid like the plague. Maybe it is lonely at the top, but I imagine it's a helluva lot lonelier if you treated people like crap to get there.