Tag Archives: army

Just like that…

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I’ve had nine months to think about what this post would look like, but surprisingly it’s not one that I started working on in advance. Now that the day of jubilee has arrived, I find myself at something of a loss for words. How do I sum up the experience that has been finding my eject handle? Is it defined by the statistics? 273 days on the hunt. 91 days of frozen time. 385 resumes submitted. Sometimes I felt like I could count off the hours of each one of those days. Almost a year of complete confidence tempered by false starts and rejections. And then moments of unadulterated joy. Whatever the moment is, it’s not defined by the statistics.

I’m feeling very conscious of those who made the jump before I have. Of how much I miss them and how much I’ll miss a few of those I’ll leave behind. I’m conscious now more than ever of home, of family, and of friends from whom I’ve been too long separated. They say you can’t go home again. I’ve been away long enough to know that everything has changed – and that nothing that matters has really changed. I’m coming home and I’ll take it as I find it, changes and all.

There is plenty of time to go into specifics later. For now, let it suffice to know that tonight I will sleep the sleep of the vindicated. My great experiment in Memphis is drawing to an end. I’ve survived my ride on the crazy train. And I’m coming home.

When I sat down to write, I thought this post would be a valedictory. It seems my nerves are still too raw for that kind of triumphalism. Give me a day or two for the reality to sink in, though, and it’s a fair bet that you’ll be reading posts with some serious swagger.

We’ve got a heartbeat…

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I hear it in the hushed conversation over cubicle walls. I see the grins and sly thumbs up offered by our own HR staffers. Somewhere just beyond my field of view, the wheels of the great green machine are in motion. We’ve got a heartbeat. It’s faint, but there. After the torturous road this process has taken just to get to the “tentative” stage, I don’t dare to think of it as a done deal. The probability of success is definitely increasing, but that’s a long way from a signed set of orders and a new desk. Nevertheless, I’m raising the confidence meter from cautiously optimistic to hopeful.

Experience has taught me and millions of others that the Army is a serious player in the game of hurry up and wait. I’ve got the waiting bit down to a science. It seems that we’re about to get a lesson in extreme hurry up. I’m confident that in this case, hurry up is far preferable.

A sign of life…

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After another week of ponderous waiting, I was given another gentle reminder that this thing up north might actually work out. I got to spend a few minutes talking to a to individual who will act as my “sponsor” during the transition and in-processing period. It wasn’t exactly the call from HR that I have been waiting for, but it’s a sign of life. At this point on the long, torturous process I seem to be overly given to looking for signs and reading tea leaves. Absent the magic moment when they throw the switch from tentative to official, that is probably as good as it’s going to get. After nine months, you’d think that I would be use to waiting for things to happen.

The ability of the system to make the simple things hard is never far from my thoughts these days. Since this whole exercise involves filling out some paperwork and moving my electrons from one database to another, it’s still hard to understand how it could possibly take as long as it does. The irony is that once they pull the trigger, they’ll probably want to give me a short reporting date and wonder why I can’t get out of here with a whole two weeks notice. I’ve been around this Army long enough to know better than spend a dime making preparations without a set of orders in hand. So, I hurry up and wait.

91 days…

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The post I was set to bring you tonight will not be appearing because the subject matter went and changed on me between the time I started writing and the time it was supposed to post. Instead of another rant about the Army personnel system, I bring you tidings of great joy. The 30-day civilian hiring freeze is over – ending its 91-day reign of terror. Don’t believe, me? Check out the Civilian Personnel website for yourself.

Aside from the system not being at a complete standstill, I’m not exactly sure what the great thaw really means yet. I know that it means that personnel offices now have a 90 day backlog of hiring actions to clear and that’s never a quick process even under the most optimal conditions. I don’t have much faith at this point in any of the possibilities that looked promising back in February. Expecting magical reanimation of things just as they were at the moment they were frozen back in March seems about as likely as breathing new life into Walt Disney’s frozen head. Sure, it’s sounds possible… maybe… but not very likely.

What this probably means is that at least now there’s a fighting chance at working through the nomination-interview-hiring process to the point where a job offer is at least a possibility. So now it’s a mad race to spool up and flood my resume back into the Army system. Nothing like being back at square one.

Progress…

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If anyone is following along at home, tonight’s update is just a brief note to say that this morning’s interview went well. That is to say as well as an interview can go when the prospect of the interviewer being able to make an offer anytime in the near future is completely unknown. Like all my other sit downs with selecting officials from across the Mid-Atlantic, this office is also subject to my nemesis the hiring freeze. That unfortunate circumstance notwithstanding, I’m comfortable that I delivered the best pitch possible… and now we’re back to the waiting game. That’s progress.

#3…

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And so we’re moving along tomorrow to interview #3, which is a good thing. Of course it’s also an Army job, which means it’s probably subject to the hiring freeze just like the others. That’s the part that’s less than good. In keeping with my casting of the wide net, I can only speculate that the more interviews I have between the now and when our dear friends lift the freeze, the better the opportunity that one or more of them will come in with an actual offer in the fabled land beyond the human resource permafrost. If not, getting the occasional interview gives me the illusion of actually making progress. In the absence of actual progress, I’m good with the illusion… for now.

P.S. Selecting officials, if you’re poking around the internet doing an informal review of names on your referral lists, please take note of the single minded determination I’m showing at achieving this objective. It’s this kind of fortitude and commitment to mission that I can bring to your office and put to work for you.

Day 75…

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We are now at day 75 of the thirty-day hiring freeze. Surely we’ve attritted off some of those overhires by now, right? Seriously, we even have a budget for the rest of the fiscal year now. So, come on already Overlord of Personnel. Let’s get the hiring process thawed out.

I haven’t racked and stacked my list lately, but the total number of resumes released into the wild stands at 335. I’d estimate that about a third of those are still in the “open” category. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 are sitting on the desk of a real human being. I’ve had two interviews for positions that are “frozen” and have another one coming up later this week. I didn’t particularly want to go outside of DoD, but they’re making it very hard to show the love right about now… so Treasury, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Coast Guard, FEMA, and a host of others are being fed into the mix as of about two weeks ago.

My search grid now extends from Philadelphia down to Richmond and from the Shenandoah Valley east to Norfolk. Like Grant contemplating a similar piece of real estate, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

Such is the ferocity of my desire to catch the last train out of Crazyville.

It’s still friggin’ freezing in here…

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The thirty-day hiring freeze and 30-day extension are now something on the order of 65 days old. Now of course there’s some logic to waiting to see if the jackrabbits in Congress can actually manage to pass a budget before sending us all home on Friday, but maybe a word of “hey, standby. We’ll let you know after Friday” would be better than the overpowering silence coming from the civilian personnel office. It’s the 10-ton elephant in the room that they refuse to address other than referring back to a memo put out over two months ago.

If you’re going to extend it, just announce that already so we can get busy retooling our resumes for jobs outside DOD. If it’s going to be dropped, how about a scientific guesstimate of when they machinery of civilian hiring might start moving again. Even with the cynicism that I usually bring to the table when discussing issues of competent leadership at pay grades above reality, I can’t believe that the decision hasn’t already been made somewhere about whether it’s time to fish or cut bait. Of course I could be completely wrong about that and the denizens of that five-sided concrete cobweb could be even more jacked up than I thought possible.

The total tonnage of backlog that’s going to exist after continuing to make announcements and conduct interviews, but not make selections is certainly going to be enough to stun a mule team in its tracks… Especially considering that mules are a damned sight easier to work with than the personnel office. Let it run another month or two and I’ll be dropping retirement papers before they manage to get it cleared up. Pay freeze, hiring freeze, and no budget in sight… It’s getting very hard to love working for Uncle.

Still haven’t found what I’m looking for…

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If you would have told me back in August when I decided it was time to pull the plug on my Memphis experience, that I’d still be firing off resumes on the first day of spring in the following year, I simply would never have believed you. The irony of coming here in the first place was that I’d alwayherdsrd that getting back to the DC area was easy because no one from outside the area had any interest in going there. That may or may not be the case, but I’ve found that in most cases for jobs inside the beltway the typical number of resumes submitted for consideration is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 with some running north of 500. I’ve got a healthy level of professional self confidence, but the odds get pretty long when you start talking about numbers like that.

There are still a couple of “maybies” out there that I haven’t written off yet, but it’s definitely slot slower going than I remember the last job search being. The department’s hiring freeze extending over the last two months, of course, hasn’t helped. The personnel office points only to the most recent memo that calls for the freeze to be reevaluated by April 1st to decide if it will be extended or to announce how hiring might be handled moving forward. It’s not reassuring that the hiring system will get back to something approaching situation normal any time soon, even if it starts up again in April. With a two month backlog and a notoriously slow process to begin with, things could be ugly for the forseeable future.

There doesn’t seem to be much to do now other than to continue piling my name onto as many heaps as possible and hope it turns up at the top of one of them. The federal government’s a big place and something will come along eventually, but this exercise in patience is wearing very thin. In hindsight, I’m sure this experience will be character building or something, but in the moment it’s enough to drive a man around the bend.