http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19259796/
I’d call them fuckwits but that would be insulting the average fuckwit.
Oh, for fuck’s sake–they can’t even get the damned mail straight?
Welcome to the Iraq War, soldier–where we won’t train you sufficently, arm you adequately, treat you appropriately, and we’ll keep messages of love and support from you, too.
Please note the word “civilian” in that article. Sounds like the Army, in its usual wisdom, hired the lowest bidder to run the mailroom. Then they’re surprised there are problems. Like they’re surprised about all the other problems that result from lack of funding for critical services resulting from the military being stretched so thin it hurts due to this stupid war.
Ya know, the military still has “hard labor” on the books as a punishment. Do civilian contractors fall under the purvue of the UCMJ?
After all the Army would never fuck the mail all on its own. It certainly wouldn’t, after the Armed Services mail service reorganization in the early 90’s, send mail for a ship underway in the Caribbean to Germany, without checking a status board to see where the ship might actually be, even if the FPO listed the ship as being generally AE (Afloat European). Then after the mail collected in Germany for three weeks it they wouldn’t send it back to Norfolk because they assumed that the ship couldn’t be deployed if it wasn’t in the European theatre of operations.
And the Army would never, ever, send the same accumulating pile of mail back of to Europe after letting it sit in Norfolk, because they couldn’t deliver it to the ship in port, so it must be underway in Europe, after all.
No, my ship never went six weeks without getting any mail at all, while the Army was handling things.
Granted this was when the new system was new, but it was particularly infuriating to everyone aboard the old Virginia at the time.
None of which excuses the idiots at Walter Reed from this fuckup. But don’t assume that things would have been any better if military personnel were handling the mail delivery there. In fact, given the amount of active duty military personnel already implicated in the fuck-ups at Walter Reed, I think it’s more likely symptomatic of a general attitude at the hospital.
Since I know someone who works at the hospital very well, I have to tell you that there’s a lot of confusion between the actual hospital and the garrison, which runs the physical facilities. Walter Reed isn’t just one building, it’s a whole campus; and services – everything from maintaining the buildings to shoveling the snow to delivering the mail – to the whole campus are provided by the garrison, NOT the hospital. The hospital ONLY provides medical care, and there have been NO complaints about the actual medical care provided; it is widely acknowledged to be superb and in many, many cases cutting edge. If, for example, I lost a limb? I would only pray that I could be treated at Walter Reed; their amputee care is truly the best in the entire world right now.
So please, don’t just lump the whole place into one nasty lump. Yes, there are a small number of people who’ve been there for many years doing their jobs who are doing as little as possible except counting down the days to retirement, and displaying really shitty attitudes in the process, just like you’ll find in any federal civilian workforce; but there are many, many others – in fact, most – who bend over backwards to do the very best job they can all the time and really do the patients proud. There are also military people who are terrific and some who aren’t. It’s just like any workforce; a few fuckups can give the whole place a bad name. And it really, truly doesn’t deserve it.
It’s a WHOLE lot easier to fire military people who aren’t doing a good job than it is federal civilians (except for contractors, obviously) – federal civilians are INSANELY protected from job loss without a MAJOR effort at this point. The system is going to change next year when the Army puts its civilians under a new merit-based system, but right now if you have someone who’s a total a fuckup, you can’t get rid of them without practically an act of Congress.
The folks who DO care about general attitudes at the hospital are doing their damnedest to change that. I suspect there’s going to be a lot of deadweights let go next year when they change the system, but in the meantime, great stuff happens there all the time. Most of it isn’t publicized, unlike the bad stuff. But I am constantly impressed and amazed by the stories I hear of good things being done quietly. They happen literally every day there.
So PLEASE don’t confuse the medical care delivered to patients with administrative screwups. There is NOT a generally bad attitude in patient care there, and it’s really hurtful to many caring and compassionate people working there – in both the hospital AND the garrison – to assume that the shitty attitudes of a very few are held by the majority. It just ain’t so.
After all, SNAFU is an army acronym, isn’t it?
Sailboat
Dumb question: what does that mean?
RO= recreational outrage.
To me it doesn’t matter who is at fault. Fix the damned problem and get that mail delivered. It’s a small thing, but a huge one for the soldiers. A screw up is a screw up: If it was a civilian, address the issue. If it was a soldier-ditto.
Righteous Outrage?
It was contract employees who screwed the pooch. We all know efficiency is so much better when it is taken from the government employees and given to the private sector. NOT
As eleanorrigby noted, Recreational Outrage (with perhaps a touch of Righteous Outrage as Pushkin suggested). The news doesn’t affect me, or anybody I know, directly. I’m just disgusted that not only were some wounded housed in apparently extremely bad conditions but the fuckwads running the place didn’t even ensure that the mail was getting through.
It’s also not a story I’ve seen getting much coverage and thought it should be more widely seen.
If we can’t fire the civilian contractors, can we at least transfer them to Thule AFB, Greenland or someplace nice like that?
I’ve got a different interpretation of “Recreational Outrage” than this thread. See, I think it does affect all of us (though not personally perhaps) when our soldiers are being treated like shit in some official capacity or 'nother. and since we (tax payers) are paying for the non service, it does indeed involve us.
“Recreational outrage” threads (to me) are those involving some criminal act - some sick fuck somewhere does some sick fucking thing, generally to a child, the helpless, kittens or puppies. It’s recreational outrage since no one would be posting that there’s nothing wrong w/doing some sick fucking thing to a child, the helpless, kittens or puppies, and all it does is allow folks to prop up their own virtues by regalling us with vivid descriptions of the sick fucking things the poster would wish on the sick fuck who did the sick fucking thing to the child, the helpless, kittens or puppies.
You can fire the civilian contractors. However, your option to replace them is another civilian contractor. Of course, they may no longer be the low bidders. The Amry is trying like mad right now to contract out as many civil service positions that they can. That’s fine but if the contractors do not perform the Army can’t rehire the civil servants, they can only go with another contractor.