Chapter 19
Jeffee makes His Last Move at IR
Since I started working for the Army in 1994, I have gone through four moves. And this last move was by far the worst. At least on the other moves nothing happened to me, any injury or disease. Plus I was actually younger in those days; it was maybe a little easier to carry boxes that are heavy and stuff but that's the way it is. I never get a choice on whether I'm going to move or not; somebody always tells me "you’re going to move."
At least I'm in a fairly decent area. We wanted to stay independent as a Directorate at Fort Sam Houston but under the Air Force joint-base concept, higher-ups decided that we would become part of J3/J5. To this day I don't exactly know what J3/J5 means; something to do with missions and operations but I don't have a clue. Once again I am the mushroom far in the back of the cave that sees very little light and you know what kind of fertilizer they use on mushrooms – poo-poo.
As is typical, the move was kind of like Congress and the budget; they kept issuing continuing resolutely solutions delaying our move. First, they told us we were going to move in October, and then they told us we were going to move in November, then December, etc. So we waited five or six months and then this lady from next door that does the security clearances suddenly informed us like Monday afternoon that we had to be completely out of the building by the next day, Tuesday. Typical government crap – you wait five months and then they want you to move yesterday.
And then for a lot of time we couldn't do anything because they had packed up our computers so we couldn’t work with them and then they gave us very few boxes to pack stuff in so we're packing our own stuff from desks and stuff but you need to have enough boxes; kind of hard to pack a box you don't have. We asked everybody we could think to help us; please bring us some boxes but twice we had to wait for hours to get boxes so naturally come Tuesday we finally do get enough boxes and we bust our asses and work very, very hard to get everything out of there by the end of business on Tuesday which we managed to do.
And then typical idiocy – we find out that the new people who moved into our old building, Building 151, basically trashed all of our nice furniture that was in the building. I think even two weeks later a whole bunch of very nice furniture was just sitting out on the lawn. Whatever they're doing over there with security clearances they could certainly use our furniture or give it to somebody else or Goodwill or somebody rather than just letting it go to rot out on the front lawn. So that's the way it is.
Of course the lady moving in to the IR building upset my boss and he said we should take every single thing; so we took all of the pictures, everything that was ours and left them very little. We took all the nice chairs and other furniture stuff; who knows if we will ever get some nice chairs again and also we take some very nice black recliner chairs, some nice green recliner chairs all the good stuff. We moved it lock, stock, and barrel over to our new location in Building 143.
Naturally in their infinite wisdom we weren't done with the move even after we moved from Building 151 to Building 143. I had a very nice office in Room 111 and they put Carol, our secretary, in the room next to me in Room 110. Then a very nice lady named Daniela, who works in the Building 143, was very nice and installed all of our computers and printers and things so we could get back on the network use the Internet and do some work again.
Then after Carol had been in her office for about three days and My boss my boss had moved into my office because his office wasn't ready yet, suddenly, immediately they tell Carol "You know the room you're in, we’re going to give that room to the Air Force Audit Agency. I want you to move out to the big conference room that's right next to Room 111". Then they decide to take the big desk in my boss's room which I believe is Room 109 and they put that out in the big conference room and that would become Carol's desk. It's a nice desk. Actually the Air Force Auditing Agency never did move into that room, out of the blue we find out some contractor now occupies the office; we don't have a clue what work the contractor is supposed to do
So for once I did get lucky; I'm the only one of the three of us who got to stay in the same office they moved me into. Amazing, usually I'm the one with the move and the other people stay put. So for once I did luckily, got to stay where I was and not have to make another move.
Some professional moving men came in and disassembled the huge big desk in my boss's new office because there's no way we could move the thing. It was like a U-shaped huge desk and no way to get it in and out of the door without dismantling it.
So they dismantled the desk and moved the desk 20 feet literally to the other side of the wall that was sitting against my boss’s office. Of course in order to make room for the desk now we had to move all the boxes we had stacked on that open conference room floor because that was available for storage then. We put the boxes there in anticipation of getting ready to unpack them all. We were waiting for the chance to unpack them all. We had to move the boxes a second and third time to make room for that desk in the area Carol was going to use. Probably another reason why I have an infected finger because I moved more boxes than I should've had to move and many of the boxes I got the move three times, not once.
So once they got Carol's desk out of my boss's office some nice people from a contractor came into My boss's office and installed some of the latest in cubicle equipment. My boss was happy with it and then they put in another one on the other side but nobody's going to sit there that I know of so, who knows? But my boss really couldn't work in his office because his computer was still looked up in my office and Carol's computer was still hooked up in her old office and she sitting out at the big desk in the big conference room. If she wants use the computer and My boss wants to use his computer, Carol goes back into her old office and My boss walks over from his office to my office ain't that unbelievable?
So musical computers went on for about maybe two days before finally we moved all of the computers to where they were supposed to be and then of course there was a delay in getting them re-hooked up to the network because they can’t hook you up to the network until you're actually active on the computer at the right port. We finally got everything installed so now at least I think we are finally, finally moved – unless God forbid something else comes along which I pray doesn't happen. And then My boss calmly walks into my office one day and says Jeff I heard a rumor were going to move from here to building 148, the old payroll building which is very similar to our old building 151, so who knows?