No more blue folders!!!

I should have known.  Two days ago, I was feeling fine and things were pretty easy.  Yesterday, smallpox hit me upside the head and I was down for the count.  They must have been waiting for me to go down.  I came into the ready room this morning to find my inbox crammed full of blue folders.  Anyone who has spent time in the navy will appreciate the picture that paints.  I'm not sure when it became standard procedure, whether it was Elmo Zumwalt, Chester Nimitz, or perhaps the great John Paul Jones himself, who decided that all internal correspondance must be placed inside a blue portfolio folder, with a routing sheet stapled to the cover.  Now they are the bane of every department head.  Today I looked at countless qualifications and designations, special requests, awards, and performance evaluations.  The flood of evals is only just beginning.  All of the E-5 (Petty Officer 2nd class) evals are due in March, so they will begin to hit my desk in a couple weeks.  There are about 35 E-5's who work in the Maintenance Department, and I have the bottom line signature on all of their evals.

   Fortunately, other than a headache this morning, the effects of the pox have subsided today.  The arm is still sore, but at least I can think again.  I also had the Alert 30 all day.  We had a brief from the "Flag JAG" (the admiral's legal officer) this afternoon on the Rules of Engagement and Political Issues related to flying in the south west Pacific ocean.  Also had a standardization board, where all the senior officers in the squadron get together and talk about our standard operating procedures, to make sure they are relavent, complete, and up to date.  I spent some time up on the flight deck, training some JO's on one of our new radio systems, the ARC-210, which gives us new communication capabilities that our community has never had.  I had the fortune of testing the first installation of this radio when I was still at the test squadron in Maryland, so I'm the defacto SME (subject matter expert) on the new gear.  This evening the ship had a General Quarters training drill.  For two hours, they pretended that the ship was under attack, and they fought imaginary fires, notional casualties, and phantom flooding.  Sounded pretty hairy.  I wouldn't really know.  I was in my stateroom watching old "Amazing Stories" episodes.  One very nice thing about being in the airwing is that we are not expected to participate in GQ drills.  If the ship really were under attack, we would be manning up to fight the enemy as we are trained - from the air.  So, during the drills, we are expected to stay out of the way.  My roommate and I enjoyed the first four episodes of Amazing Stories, including the great one about the B-17 crew who get a piece of an Me-109 stuck in the fuselage, jamming the belly gunner into his bubble, with the landing gear also fused up.  They are forced to make a belly-landing, which is sure to crush the poor kid in the turret--who up until this mission has been their good luck charm.  I love how it ends.

  After GQ, I finally finished weeding through the stack of folders.  I'm sure the inbox will be full again tomorrow.