The other half

After my little mini-rant the other day, I realized that I made a few of my co-workers look pretty bad. And some of them deserve it.  But there's another side of the spectrum:  the grizzled old coots just hanging on till retirement.

One of the gents who pops in to my office and snags chocolate out of my candy bowl is a LTC with lots of chest salad.  The guy's been there, done that, got the t-shirt.  He uses a standing desk because years of going there and doing that has jacked his back up pretty badly.  He's got about a year left, and then he's happily going out the door and heading to the house.  This guy will never be the "been there for three decades and holding on with his fingernails because he can't do anything else" that you too often see in a USAR unit.  He's got it set up so that when it's his time to go, he's gone.  Riding a motorcycle.  A very nice Dyna-Glide with lots of custom work on it.  I've seen it.  It's shiny.

The point is that there are still some folks sitting in a TDA unit because they have deployed.  Lots.  And while they could deploy again if needed, they're sitting at the end of their careers, hoping to not do any more damage to themselves before they hit their 20.

The reason military folks can retire at 20 years Active Federal Service is that there are a lot of troops who can't make it past that.

So while it doesn't make up for the oxygen-stealing Turd, I at least have some good folks that I work with.