The big inspection started today. The one we had three weeks ago was just a warm up to prepare us for this week. We're being inspected by the staff of the Commander, Naval Air Forces; it's the highest level inspection that squadrons are subject to.

So all week we'll have very senior navy enlisted poking into our business. These guys are looking for any deviations. We don't like them. The way I think of it, I'm a good Catholic, and they're the Inquisition. They'll take any excuse to burn someone, regardless of the justice. Dropping that simile, I think of my job as providing safe gear and aircraft for flight, while their job is ensuring that every ambiguous clause in an obscure order that you've never heard of is being observed to the letter.

My program gets inspected in about a half hour. I think it's good, but there might be something wrong that I'm not even aware of.

And as a bad sign, the first inspectors already rolled through the shop this morning. They were doing the battery safety program. So after we were grilled about storage of our AAs for NVGs and strobe lights, and lithium cells for radios, they asked us where we removed and stored the batteries from the shop computers, which are laptops in docking statements. We looked at them with blank incredulity. We now have a discrepancy we have to document our correcting, specifically: all lithium batteries must be removed for their host device, and stored individually in a locked storage area, when the host device for the battery is not in use. So we're supposed to disassemble our computers every night to fulfill the requirements of a battery safety order that was written when the closest thing to a laptop computer was a Kaypro II.

I'd be willing to correct myself for legitimate safety issues, but that kind of transparent bull crap really sucks out any belief I may have had that these guys are here to help their fellow servicemen.

Posted by: Boviate at 09:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 341 words, total size 2 kb.