No ####, there I was. In the middle of a 2-month rotation at NTC as a mech inf XO. Six months prior, I ordered all new turret and hull TM's. They arrived just before we put our vehicles on the rails. Every crew had the latest TM in mint condition. Then along comes my Bn XO one day in the middle of the central corridor and says, after spot-checking maintenance, "XO, you're all dicked up. None of your crews know how to do PMCS because none of them have TMs." Well, my quick response was, "sir, they don't know how to do PMCS, but it's not because they don't have TMs. I just got 28 new ones prior to deployment!" Well, that was not what the crews had told him. Irate, I then gathered up all of the crews and let loose with a solid minute of expletives in which I think I managed to touch every base in accusing them of violating DADT, insisting that they had feces in lieu of brains, and directing them to perform an impossible carnal feat. Then I went back to what I was doing with my Bn XO in tow, asking, "that's it?" Yup. That's it. They all "found" their TMs.Originally Posted by OfTheTroops
Games like that were commonplace. We don't have 5988Es. We don't have TMs. The mechanics are lazy. I annotated this fault, but the part isn't on order. But if the TM were a serial-numbered e-reader that would merit a FLIPL if lost, then no more claims of "my chain of command didn't give me the pubs I needed to do my job." If the 5988E were incorporated into it, then no more "we can't do maintenance because we don't have 5988Es." And if it's all electronically tracked, then when a fault disappears from the 5988E the XO can check to see why and then explain to the crew, "yeah, you dumb####, that was deleted because the fault you wrote down wasn't actually a fault - you just wrote it down to obtain another part to hoard." Of course, then I guess the risk is that they'll deliberately break the e-reader to avoid PMCS.
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