A story over on r/talesfromtechsupport, reminded me of this. As much as I would love to forget it ever happened. This is nothing more than a rant. It's been 40 years and it's still something that pisses me off, but that I'm also prouder of than anything else I've ever done.

A bit of background, this was back in 1982/83 time frame, USAF was a LOT slacker back then on a lot of things. Mobility was still pretty much a paper thing and no one in the hospital took any kind of training that wasn't medically inclined seriously. Which is why it wasn't unusual to see a Staff Sergeant (me) and the Chief Nurse (full bird. It was a regional hospital) yelling at each other in the Admin hallway.

Not long after I put on my E-5 stripes, I got dumped into the Mobility NCOIC/Disaster Preparedness NCOIC and the training involved in that. This was supposedly a two man shop with a Major OIC and a Master Sergeant NCOIC. A Master Sergeant on the ROAD program had it for the two years before I got there, so you can imagine the shape it was in (classified messages with drop dead dates of over a year gone by in his unsecured desk is actually the least of it). He retired two months before I took over and no one had touched it in the meantime. Both of the programs had received unsats in the ORI that happened right before I PCSed in, for obvious reasons, and there was jack shit documentation on anything. Another bit of background, I HATE having to do a deep dive into the regs.

The whole thing of me as a newly minted E-5 taking on this role is a whole nother story that I definitely don't want to get into.

I am going to assume that the time frame for reinspection from a failed major inspection is still around the same now, our's was set for six months after the failure.

Lots of nights with the office door locked, catching a couple hours of sleep on the floor. Lots of running across base to the Surgeon General's office to get things in the regs clarified (headquarters base), lots and lots and LOTS of yelling for bodies to be assigned to empty mobility slots, bodies to get mobility training and getting people shaken free so they could to get mandatory disaster preparedness training.

Oh, and if you are an old USAF mobility NCO...you can blame me for the six part folders.

Lots of operating instructions written, a few hospital supplements to the regs drafted and a whole new command wide hospital disaster preparedness reg written by the OIC and assistant OIC of Environmental Health (with a little bit of help and a lot of typing from me). Stripped the hospital wards of everyone over E-6 when we got an actual deployment of the Air Transportable Hospital. Because they were the only ones that were trained. Including the Chief Nurse. I got the bodies I had been harassing her for when they got back. We had no computers back then and the transcription pool had a lock on the Lanier word processors, so everything typed by hand.

Two weeks before the inspection team was due, I got a newly PCSed captain in. I think the assistant hospital admin (Capt) and the hospital admin (full bird) didn't want the team to know I had been filling slots way above my pay grade. She really dug in and helped me finish the last of the details before the team arrived. She also got an MSM for taking the programs from unsat to...outstanding across the board. I didn't even get a commendation medal out of it (asst admin again).

So there's my rant. Still salty after all these years.