Left Hand, Right Hand

[crazylegs]

It would appear that training school no longer have a grasp of reality.

To explain this I need to do a little back story. About risk assesments.

Anyone who works in the UK is aware of and knows about Risk Assesments, essentially they are documents that attempt to foresee all reasonable risks to a particular job or activity within that job role. Once this is done they give actions that reduce risk to the person undertaking the activity (ie if you're on a bike you wear a cycle helmet)

This means that we have people whos sole job it is is to generate these documents and issue the advice out to various departments.

One of these documents is the risk assesment for foot patrol. In the document it states that we should carry mobile phones in case our radios fail for whatever reason (gee, that's comforting).

We've had a new batch of recruits come through recently, and as such they are very right/wrong mindset, as you tend to be once you've come out of training. So when I pulled my mobile from my pocket one of them asked me why I was carrying it as they get told in training school not to carry mobile phones for any reason.

Great.

This means we have a group of people in one room at Head Quarters undertaking a role mandated under law to reduce the risk to us and another group, also at HQ telling us to not do things we are supposed to do as decreed by the first group.

Wonderful.

[Arm]

I had similar instances in the Army.

I was in Kuwait at one point, and I was tasked to guard a bus and make sure that everyone on the bus got from point A to point B. A being a camp and B being a firing range.

I wasn't given a map. I was given a set of directions - the important difference being, with a map, if you miss a turn, you know where to turn around, and with directions, if you miss a turn, you're FUCKED.

Now, the driver's a third country national- he don't speak English, per se. I don't speak whatever his language is. All he knows is, I'm big, wearing armor, have a gun, and don't like him. Probably not his best day, nor mine.

I happen to also have a matte black (an important color- if whatever you've got, in the military, doesn't match your camo pattern, it it's at least black, you're generally good.) GPS receiver. It was a gift to me from my parents, who in a moment of parental prescience, decided they would prefer one of their children not get completely LOST in the desert.

GPS's are not standard issue in the Army, but they are frequently issued, and depending on the model that Supply got that day, some of them are more or less identical to mine. So we're on the bus and, miracle of miracles, we managed to make it to the range and only went off the road a few times on our way there. Half the turns wound up being 'follow that humvee!' (not in my convoy- I didn't have a convoy- but I reasoned that humvees were probably only going from one camp to another, and the national borders are marked with 20-foot-high berms, so I wasn't TOO likely to wind up in Iraq accidentally)... sort of guesswork, but now I had a route, mapped in my little device, and surely we're good to go, right?

I'm off the bus (last on, first out, unless the driver looks like he's gonna bolt) and all the passengers are filing out to go do their firing qualifications. One of 'em looks at the GPS clipped to my gear and he says, "Is that issue?" I tell him, "Negative, sergeant, it's my personal GPS."

He tells me to put it away and he better not see it again.

...maybe he REALLY LIKED sand, I don't know.

Looking back, I'm amazed I never fragged anyone.

There's just something about a large government bureaucracy that creates situations like that, I think. "Here's a good way to do things better. Now, bury it. Tell NO ONE. If you see someone doing things that way, punish them. Then ask why things went wrong."

[icmedia]

There's just something about a large government bureaucracy that creates situations like that, I think. "Here's a good way to do things better. Now, bury it. Tell NO ONE. If you see someone doing things that way, punish them. Then ask why things went wrong."

Sounds pretty standard for any workplace, really.