March 24

I just finished my last QTP assessment that I should ever have to do in my Air Force career. A QTP assessment is an online quiz over a specific section of the air transportation career field. You take these before being signed off on a task. The Air Force is pretty ahead of the curve when it comes to computer training. It is both good and bad. Good in that it is easy to forget things, especially being a reservist, and it is fast and easy to access. The bad is that it is just one more thing we have to worry about completing. I am one of only 10% of our crew that have all of them completed. I’m sure they will invent more in the future to complete, but at least it will not be over my specific work section.
I now have about a week to where I can just watch movies when I am not busy, which is most of the time. They have the home portal for our command section of the base online, and there is a link called “morale web.” You click on that and there are links to movies, music, and t.v. shows. They have a lot of movies, more like redbox but not as good as Netflix. It’s pretty cool and sometimes I cannot believe it is approved for military use. But as the name says, it is designed to keep you from going crazy. I wish we had this when I was in the Navy, back then they could only broadcast movies in the mess-hall through the comm-center. I’ll never forgot how I started to cry during “The Fly II” when Eric Stolz has to kill his dog because he got deformed by the teleporter machine. Somebody noticed and said, “Buck are you crying?!” It was so embarrassing, what can I say I love dogs! Wow, that was random, anyway, fast forward to today. I have only watched a few movies on it, the only problem is they have a few very recent movies, would seem too good to be true as they only were out a month ago, but I discovered they are Haji-movies, kind of blurry. I tried to watch “The Eagle” and it was so fuzzy, I stopped. Like I said I have a week, then I start my SEI-45 class online. It’s part of my teacher certification, it has to do with English as a second language type of stuff. $80 that I do not get reimbursed, really stinks. But I have had 4 years to complete it so I need to get it done. It’ll give me something to do, but I heard it is going to get busy here in May so hopefully I will not get overwhelmed.
We’re having a pizza party for the outgoing crew tomorrow, hate to say that only half deserve it. Most of the guys stopped caring, sometimes their immaturity and lapses of mental toughness amaze me. I had sergeant "vulcan" two days ago say he’s absolutely had it with these guys, pretty much ordering me to write anyone up that breaks a rule and cancelling our on-call half days. He said warnings are over, and “if any of those guys mentions the word “morale” to me again, I’m going to go Ape-___!!!” So of course I had to deliver the news and now a few of them are giving me the silent treatment. That’s ok, I’m tired of sounding like a broken record, I can keep it loose as long as you follow the rules. I don’t want to be here either but I have a problem when they complain about their stuff, when I think of the three years of hell I had in the Navy, it’s like, “don’t even go there!” Anyways, the pizza is good for showing the hard working guys you care because you don’t want to break their spirit. They need to know that the Air force will take care of you if you do the right thing.