Welcome

Hopefully this is the first of many posts.


I'm deploying and have received several requests to create a blog so people can stay updated on whatever crap I decide to get myself into while I'm in training and over in the AOR. I'll try to include as many specifics as I can but we all know that, with the military, certain details can't be discussed openly or on a medium such as this. I will promise that everything I include on this blog is true to the best of my recollection. I say recollection because I may not be able to update this as much as I would like while over there; maybe never, who knows? I will at the very least be keeping a paper journal so I put everything down that happens over the course of the next year that will be the bane of my existence.


As you may or may not know, I'm not exactly pleased about my current situation. Let me explain:


To say I skated through high school would be to say that water is damp. I barely graduated but not because I didn't understand the material; my diction may lead you to believe I've taken a few english classes in my day. I skated through high school because I couldn't muster the motivation to get off my butt and do the homework I viewed as a pointless exercise. I was never one to practice anything. If I wasn't instantly good at it, it wasn't worth my time. So I didn't do my schoolwork. I don't pretend that I'm the first or the last person to underachieve, it's just a fact of life.


My lack of motivation to get my schoolwork done directly resulted in my lack of motivation to apply to more colleges after getting rejected by my first 3 choices. I had a good ACT score (29) but nobody wanted a student with a 2.4 GPA who had to take extra classes his senior year to receive enough credits to graduate. I'm sure I could have gotten into community college but I was above that. Instead I decided to take myself into the "real" world. That's right, I got a job. But even more than that dude, I got a Dell.


I worked for a company that did subcontracting for Dell. I received work-orders in the morning and went out an repaired computers that needed hardware replacements during the afternoon. It paid good when there was work to be done but more often than not there was only a couple of work orders to be split between 3 technicians. The money wasn't cutting it. I was stuck in a job that wasn't paying the bills in a small town that wasn't going anywhere for me. I needed a catalyst for change and that catalyst turned out to be the Air Force.


I got the glory story that every 18-23 year old receives. Talk of the money, the benefits, the job experience, the fact that I could retire at age 39, etc. etc. etc. I heard everything I wanted to hear and was told everything I wanted to be told. It was too perfect. So I put the pen to paper. I signed up to be a computer programmer for two reasons. (breaking news: I'm watching CBS and they are running a section of Facebook Faux Pas. And I just heard the reporter use the word "newbies." Just thought you should know.) Reason number one: I thought I wanted to do that for a living. I also thought wrong. Reason number two: how many computer programmers get deployed? Honestly...


Fast foreward one and a half years. I've been at my first assignment for just over a year and it's not bad. I guess you could say it's like any office setting. There's people I really like and there's people I will never miss when I leave. People gave me a hard time when I first got there because, well, you could say I'm a smartass and needed to be taken down a couple notches. I think there's probably a better chance Will Farrel putting out a genuinely funny movie than a few hopped-up upper management I-so-fucking-important jerks bringing me down or adjusting my attitude for long. Thankfully most of the people that had a hard-on for me left or deployed after a while so I kind of got to adjust my surrounding to me after a while. A few people learned to take me a lot less seriously and I learned to take them a lot less seriously. Trust me, the military has enough seriousness as it is, it doesn't need me to add to it. I think most people that know me there now realize that I joined for one reason: to mop up the mistakes I made when I was younger. I'm not in it for the long run. I'm not the most patriotic person in America. I'm not all "HooRAH!" about the conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't hate my country, I just don't always agree with it. Horray for freedom, right? I want to get my college paid for. I want to have a decent and secure job while I'm earning that. I want that job to get me valuable experience for when I'm on the outside.


So needless to say I didn't exactly volunteer for this assignment. My whole attidute the last couple of weeks that I've known about this has been "psh, I'm not going to do that. What's the worse they can do, not deploy me?" While probably false, that's my mindset. I'm going to miss my wife, my friends, and my family. Hell, I'm going to miss my dog more than all of them! The only upside to this is that I'm going with a good friend. That's honestly the only thing that has kept me from trying to botch this in any way possible to get out of going. That being said, this should be very interesting. Hopefully I can come out of the experience with some funny stories. I'm going to be bored over there so I'm going to have to entertain myself somehow. I'm not going to lie, 75% of this blog will probably be me bitching. I'm 9 time zones away from everything I know, what do you expect? But hopefully I can pull enough out of my day to fill the other 25% with tales of adventure, comedy, and debauchery. If I can't do that then I'll just fill in the rest with white space.


PS,
As a computer programmer, it depresses me that I had to put html tags in this to get it format the way I wanted...