If I have to explain why the shade of amber on a tracker represents a risk level one more time I am going AWOL
I am sitting in the S3 shop at 2200 on a Sunday night and I am staring at a PowerPoint slide like it is the God damn Mona Lisa. My XO decided that the brigade commander doesnt like the way we visualize maintenance statuses so I have spent the last six hours re-aligning text boxes and making sure the "amber" color is consistent across forty different slides. It does not matter that half the vehicles in the motor pool are basically expensive paperweights because we are missing parts that have been on backorder since the Surge. No. What matters is that the arrow pointing to the deadlined fleet is perfectly centered and uses a specific shade of forest green that makes the BC feel warm and fuzzy inside.
This is what my life has become as a staff officer. I went to BOLC and spent months learning how to lead soldiers in the field just to end up being a profesional interior designer for a guy who forgets my name every Tuesday. The sheer amount of man-hours wasted on "slideology" in this man's Army is enough to fund a whole new branch of service. We have three different trackers for the same tasker and none of them actually match because the NCOICs are all using different versions of the same Excel sheet that was corrupted in 2014. But sure let us spend another two hours arguing about whether a bullet point should be a square or a circle. It is absolutely soul crushing.
I look at the lieutenants in the companies and I almost envy them. At least they are getting yelled at for something real like a lost serialized item or a soldier doing something stupid at a local strip club. I am getting yelled at because my "way ahead" slide has a typo in the third sub-bullet of a proyected training event that is definitely going to get canceled anyway. The Green Weenie is real and it lives in the HDMI cable of a conference room in the basement of building 100. I am convinced that if we just stopped making slides the entire US military would just freeze in place like a glitchy video game.
The best part is that tomorrow morning the BC is going to walk into the room take one look at the first slide and tell us he wants to see it in a "different format" by COB. Then we will start the whole cycle over again like some kind of military themed Groundhog Day. I have a degree in engineering and I am currently debating the optical properties of a "caution" yellow hex code. I am going to hit the shoppette on the way home and buy enough Tornados and white monsters to make my heart skip a beat. It is the only way to feel alive after a day of being a slide ranger .