feb. 17

Morale hasn’t been so great for me the last few days. Work has been a challenge and time is going by so slow. It seems like every hour here is like three hours back home. Man I’m even getting tired of the food already and it hasn’t even been three weeks. I’ve also had several people back home not return my emails, very annoying. That’s one thing that has always bugged me is when people don’t answer you back, in some cases it only takes a few seconds. It makes me feel not very appreciated
Work has been so up and down. At first it was learning the job on the fly, with all the different lingo’s, anacronyms, and concepts brought up, it has been hard to keep them straight. There are a few people that I am going to use a pseudo-name for their real name. I would only put stuff on this blog that I could feel comfortable enough saying something to someone straight to them if I had, but honestly this blog is for my friends and family to read and is honestly not inteneded for March personnel to read. If they do though, they will see names on here they won't recognize, such as sergeant "Right", sergeant "Jump-to", sergeant "tense", sergeant "middle ground" and so on. I have been making good progress on this and now there are new challenges to my job: Putting fires out, mending communication barriers, and keeping everyone happy. Day shift has complained about one item or another for the last five days straight, either cleaning issues or cargo baggage issues. These cargo issues seem to coincide with Gilman no longer being the bag supervisor, because when he was, there were no complaints. Things came to a head Tuesday when I stopped by the terminal when I was off to pick something up, proceeded to get an earfull about a pallet we were responsible for, not getting finished. I was annoyed because I particularly remember our assistant NCOIC telling me, “I gotta run back out there and finish the pallet,” now I'm being told it was only half-way finished. I took down notes so I could remember the numerous complaints and stickied them to me desk. I was going to talk to the whole section that night and explain in no uncertain terms they needed to get their foot out of their ---, I was tired of being yelled at! In hindsight this would not have been good to do because when you’re new you can’t assume anything, you still need to get feedback. Luckily my speech did not get really far. When I came in my assistant NCOIC was at my desk, printing the schedule. I was talking to segeant "right" and then thought , “I left all of my sticky notes on the desk,” he’s going to see them. I really just wanted to talk about everything on the notes to the whole night crew, before he saw them to get my message across. Sure enough he proceeds to ask the day NCOIC about the notes and explaining the situation. Before I know it, it escalates into a heated discussion between the night assistant NCOIC and sergeant "tense" the dust had settled, after the day people left shift, we discovered major communications breakdowns. On the day the discrepancy occurred we had asked day baggage guys if they could finish the pallet, which they in turn forgot that we asked them when confronted by sergeant "right". We then later discover that the issues days had with us, they committed the same discrepancies during shift change. The bottom line was though, that there are issues due to communication breakdowns and not a “lack of effort” thing. It is what it is, but that has been day shifts perception of night shift long before I got here, probably because our workload is slower then theirs. As annoying as this all is, We all want to be able to work together and not against each other. We do not want a “shift wars” occurring, so I’m just shutting my mouth, and that goes with trying to explain all the communication breakdowns occurring that involve sergeant "right" have been other scenarios where days are communicating an issue but are failing to do their research in seeing if there is a communications issue between thew shifts or even between their own people. These situations that I have followed up on I have discovered just that. I told sergeant "right" there are two sides to every story” and I’m going to keep hammering home that point. Just because the day shift complains about something does NOT mean they are not part of the problem. I think what I just said is going to be a thorn that will keep coming up. After all this drama I have a situation where one of my airman is offended by the way our counter supervisor treated her, so I have to get both sides of that story and be objective because the airman is also my friend. Then the day shift is trying to take one of my airman to day shift because they are supposedly short on people, but this airman is very valuable to us. Drama, drama, drama. I now see how my job is starting to unfold, as a politician. I was thinking though that this is great training for becoming a future school assistant principal. Quite a few parallels with satisfying different entities and finding common middle ground between parties. Anyways, I cannot allow this job to stress me to the point where I think about it after I’m off of work. I like teaching much more