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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (213038)	1/8/2003 11:58:09 AM
From: Box-By-The-Riviera™	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

after i leave the country all of them to zero if it works out i'll come back

To: Win-Lose-Draw who wrote (213038)	1/8/2003 4:09:01 PM
From: Lee Lichterman III	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

>>neither waste nor pork amount to squat compared to defense, SS and medicare. so where in those three are you willing to cut? << There is plenty of waste and pork in defense, probably as much if not more than in the regular waste and pork categories. Someone had the great idea to have different colors of money to spend for each program. If you don't spend each pot of money, you get less next year. We NEVER, EVER, NEVER have money for anything we NEED. Aircraft parts, computer upgrade funds, housing money or stuff like that but every single year, we have tons of left over for "Self Help Projects", Decorating improvements and of course the all important Golf Course maintenance. I have seen airman living in dorm rooms that look like closets with 3 foot holes in the walls where the plumbing was fixed but there wasn't money to re-spackle it but the golf courses get upgraded each year and are kept immaculate because the General wants his golf course looking good. When I was in Guam, the dorms were so bad, the guys sleeping in them got wet every time it rained ( and it rains every day in Guam). The money for the dorm renovation got diverted to expand the Colonel's House so he could make his living room larger to "entertain" important dignitaries. Never mind we have Officer's clubs and conference centers for this purpose. Every year we can't get parts for planes, computer upgrades but we are scrambled to come with ways to put in new carpet, plant trees or change decorations because there is too much base beautification money left over at the end of each fiscal year. Also, every time a base gets a new commander, about every two years or so, they always, and I mean ALWAYS, redecorate their offices. New desk, new carpet, fresh paint job etc. Most of the pilots get orders to fly some non existant mission so they can fly their own fighters when they have to go to a conference instead of taking commercial air. Never mind it costs a few hundred thousand to put one up in the air vs a commercial airline ticket that costs a couple hundred. Of course, they always have their golf clubs in the travel pods too. Every time there is a hop across the ocean, you can guarantee that the plane will suddenly develope maintenance problems of some mysterious sort so they have to land and spend a couple days in Hawaii or the Azores. I could go on and on about the way we have to order our supplies but that would take all day and night. Lets just say that due to contract limitations, we hardly ever go to the lowest bidder like many people think. Everything has to be politically correct. If I can buy a light bulb downtown for $1.00, here, we have to buy a certain percentage from minority or female owned businesses and the smaller the business the better to where that same light bulb ends up costing us $1000.00 The software we buy is a joke. Never mind that big sound companies make something that is time tested and we know it works and can get support for it. Instead we buy some mom and pop form program where the company goes out of business a year later and there is no support when it blows up every 5 minutes. Too much tradition and secret hand shakes to change the military though. The military was made when the average enlisted guy was a plow boy that never got past the 5th grade. Officers were needed because they were often the only ones that could read and write. Now days it is almost the opposite. Many of our officers are the guys that got drunk the whole time in college and learned nothing. They have useless degrees in the arts, underwater basket weaving or something like that and can't get a job on the outside so they come here and make big bucks to have some senior enlisted guy that has a couple engineering degrees himself but doesn't want to mess with the officer politics babysit him. I don't want to sound like we are all a bunch of screw ups as we are the best in the world but it is on the backs of the junior NCOs that we win wars. The whole establishment needs a cleansing but it needs to be done from the middle out otherwise the old hats will just rename everything and change nothing. I cringe everytime I hear someone talk about GE's 3 Sigma. You know how many useless management programs the Air Force has adopted over my 20 years? Buckstop, quality Air force, the new one now is Operational Risk Management complete with Pie charts, flow diagrams etc etc etc. No wonder no one can ever make a simple decision. -ggggg- End of rant, lunch is over and I have to go back to work. Good Luck, Lee