Monthly Archives: January 2013

Chapter 54, “Happy Anniversary”

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Happy Anniversary!!  Well friends, it’s been exactly one year since I started on this journey.  At first I thought I would write these things once a month or maybe once a quarter but, if you’ve been with me since last January, you know that I’ve developed an addiction to sharing.  My intention is to keep this up as long as ya’ll are interested or at least mildly amused.  I am, however, doing something a little different today.  You might assume I’m being lazy but the truth is, Chapter 1 is just as timely today as it was a year ago.  Remember, I wrote this before the FSA (Force Structure Announcement).  I was either prescient or  part of a pretty good rumor network.  I’m not telling which!

So here it is, Chapter 1.  Integrity first!  Service before self!  Excellence in all we do!

 

I have lots of books.  I’m not really a book collecting kind of guy, but over 34 years I’ve accumulated a fairly substantial library.  At home I have an office, or man cave in the current vernacular, although I don’t have a TV.  It’s just my computer, my “I love me wall”, and lots of bookshelves (If you know Peg, IKEA of course!).  I’ve got a “do it yourself” section, a theology section, a fiction section, a Ronald Reagan section, and a smattering of political references.  On the other hand my library at work is a bit more, shall we say, eclectic.

I have books jammed in the credenza, in the drawers, on the coffee table and every time I move I’m amazed at how many boxes it takes to empty the office.  I’ve got Ayn Rand, Charles Colson, Natan Sharansky, and C.S. Lewis just to name a few, but there isn’t really an overarching theme to any of it.  Just things I find interesting.

At the top of the “interesting” list is a thrilling read entitled, “Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, 1995 Report to the President”.  In 1995 I was here at Pittsburgh as the Chief of Stan/Eval.  A job I loved but, after 9 years and multiple ASEVs, decided to leave in 1999 for a DO job in Youngstown.  But I digress.  I remember clearly the day that the proposal was made by the DoD to close Pittsburgh and that moment is captured precisely in the Commission Report with the quote: “It’s operating costs are the greatest among Air Force Reserve C-130 operations at civilian airfields”.  Well, we were gobsmacked!  We knew our financial situation here at Pittsburgh.  We only pay $20,000 per year to lease our property and it includes all fire fighting and crash/rescue services from the County.  Greater Pittsburgh has an international reputation as the most efficient snow removal airport in the nation and the runways are open 24/7 with almost no interruption even with the occasional blizzard.  The county even comes over and repaints the lines on our ramp for free.  We could only conclude that either other airports pay the units to be there or there was something “rotten in Denmark”, or at least Georgia.

We had some pretty smart guys here at the time, math/accounting types, so after the BRAC folks provided us their data base we were able to dig into numbers and it quickly became obvious that something wasn’t quite right.  “Someone” had taken many of the highest costs from all of the C-130 units and plugged them into the data for Pittsburgh and in some cases, numbers were just fabricated.  AFRES had decided what they wanted the answer to be and had, through the plans office, made the numbers add up.

The BRAC commissioner assigned to talk with the 911th was a small businessman from Rapid City, South Dakota and as we started the interview I remember him brushing aside discussions of value to the community and economic impact.  His perspective was that all communities suffer when their unit is closed and he just wanted facts.  Well, when the cooked books were presented to him, his whole attitude changed.  He gathered up the spreadsheets and headed out the door.

His conclusions were veiled in the paragraph:  “The commission found costs to operate Pittsburgh International Airport Air Reserve Station were inaccurate.  With corrected data applied to the COBRA model, the commission found Pittsburgh was one of the least costly installations to operate”.  As we all know, the commission eventually placed all C-130 bases on the list and made them defend themselves.  The rumor was perpetuated, and the myth continues to this day, that Pittsburgh pointed the finger at all of the other units when, in reality by attempting to cook the books, HQ placed all units at risk.

Eventually Chicago closed, mostly because the mayor literally told the commission that he didn’t want the unit there.  General Macintosh came to Pittsburgh and apologized at a commanders’ call for “mistakes” that were made and told us that “heads had rolled”, or at least been move to other offices.  But the end result was a community which now rabidly defends the 911th as it does all things “Pittsburgh” and offers its sons and daughters to its Reserve unit at a higher rate than any other C-130 unit in AFRC.

Luckily, we’re much more enlightened these days.  We’ve imbued our AF culture with TQM/6 Sigma/AFSO21 and all decisions are fact based/metric-micro-managed and we can be sure that everything we do is done to save the taxpayer the most amount of money and not to meet petty political parochial agendas.

What happened in the next BRAC – Ditto!

A Happy Man!

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Not really a new blog, but how can I not share my joy with as many friends as possible!

Charlotte Ann Fodi, born 23 Jan, 0059, 9 lbs 5 oz, 21 1/2 inches.  Her first photo.  I’m obviously happier than her!

Charlotte and Me

Chapter 53, Remodeling

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I’ve started my second post-retirement big project and it’s a doozy. My parents bought their little 1 1/2 story cottage in 1962 for a whopping $14,000.  They raised five of us there in three and a half bedrooms (one bedroom was actually just the landing at the top of the stairs!) and one bathroom. Eventually my brother Tim and I couldn’t walk through any of the doorways on the second floor without ducking and in the summertime we had to sleep with fans blowing directly on us because of the heat.  But it was home, and for my Mom, it still is.  Shortly after moving in Dad decided that the kitchen in the place wasn’t really working for them.  It was nowhere near the dining room and was your typical 1950 tiny thing with metal cabinets.

He and mom were out one evening at the new fangled mall and noticed that the Equitable Gas store (a local gas utility) had a “For Sale” sign on their “Kitchen of the Future” in-store display.  It had all of the latest in kitchen innovations like a stainless steel gas cooktop and fancy wall oven and state of the art cabinets.  The only problem was the configuration.  It’s actually very difficult to describe.  Let’s just say that there wasn’t one right angle in the entire thing.  As a result of the odd angles there were cabinets that were your standard 2 feet deep at one side but then tapered to 4 inches deep at the other.  It was, after all, a store display and never really intended to be used by anyone.  But dad was not deterred.  He took measurements and realized that the whole thing would fit in the house if he turned the master bedroom into the kitchen.  He hired a contractor and soon we had the “Kitchen of the Future” in our house.

We also had the oddest kitchen in the world.  Because of the shape of the thing, about a third of the room was unusable space behind the cabinets.  The contractors had to erect several walls and the lost area ended up being a, sort of, barely accessible storage room.  Decades went by and eventually the “Kitchen of the Future” became the “Normal Kitchen” and then the “Old Kitchen” and, eventually, the “Retro Kitchen”. We tried to update it with a fancy 1970s fake brick backsplash and, a dishwasher, and new paint, but time takes its toll.  The countertops began to crack and, because of the weird shape, they were impossible to replace. There wasn’t enough paint and silicone sealant in the world to salvage the room.

So, I promised mom I’d solve the problem after I retired.  I’ve gutted the entire room. I’ve removed the wall between the dining room and the kitchen, I’ve replaced the single overhead light with 6 high intensity LED recessed cans.  I’ve re-drywalled the ceiling and recaptured the lost space behind the cabinets.  I’m installing a double wall oven, a heated porcelain tile floor, an island, and quartz countertops throughout.  She loves to bake and this is going to be a bakers kitchen.  It’s going to be a whole new kitchen.  A whole fresh start.

We start our lives as “People of the Future”.  We have dreams and ambitions, things we want to be and things we want to do but somewhere along the way things get, well, messy.  Bad decisions leading to unfulfilled dreams.  Bad relationships with baggage and bitterness.  We become “Normal” people and then “Old” people and we think no amount of paint (or silicone) can make us new again. And we’re right.

But there are second chances.  There is a way to hit “Ctrl-Alt-Del” on our lives and it begins not with your son remodeling, but with God’s Son.  You just have to ask!

Chapter 52 – Hot Water

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I like to make decisions based on facts.  Now I’m not a pure, technocratic, heartless decision-maker but, all things being equal, I’ll always weigh my decisions towards cold, hard facts.  I understand how other people come to decisions and I appreciate that, but it amazes me how, given the facts, two people can come to two completely different conclusions.

I have this odd clock on the back of my head that tracks the age of all of the appliances I’m responsible for.  I know that’s weird but, since I own rental property, I try to be prepared for the next plumbing/electrical/toilet/furnace/appliance crisis.  The worst situation, in my mind, is a hot water heater failure.  You just can’t ignore it for a day since it usually results in shutting off all water to the house and a large amount of hot water spewing all over the basement.  It’s always a same day repair and it’s never convenient.

Three years ago my head clock went off over the hot water heater in my house.  I remember my dad and I changing it but I couldn’t quite remember when.  So I dug out the receipt (yes, I save receipts) and realized that the “9 year” hot water tank was 18 years old!  I was sure failure was imminent.  Not that big of a deal but I decided when it failed I would replace it with a tankless system.  I had installed one in my guest house next door and I loved the fact that I wasn’t keeping 50 gallons of water in the basement cooking at 120 degrees all of the time.  Cold water in one side of the little box on the wall, hot water out the other side.  Your hand on the spigot has total control of the electric bill.

What I did realize was, when it did eventually fail, I wouldn’t have time to order one online and wait for it to be delivered. So I bit the bullet, bought one, and sat it on a shelf in the basement.  Fast forward three years.  Two weeks before Christmas, with the impending arrival of a house full of guests, I decided to just change out the heater.  I warned Peg I would have to turn off the water for an hour or so, which didn’t thrill her, but I got up at 6:00 and had the thing pretty much installed before she managed to drag herself out of bed.  Another post-retirement project complete.  I’m in utility bill heaven.  Folks think I’m being green.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I’m being cheap, and I’m proud of it.  If being green doesn’t save me money then I won’t have any part of it!

It’s been installed for a month now so I asked Peg the other day how she liked the heater.  I know it was an odd question since most wives only care about whether or not hot water magically comes out of the pipe when you rotate the knob, but I guess I was looking for a little praise for my good planning and efforts to be an efficient provider.  I told her that I had actually shortened the time I spend in the shower since I now had complete control of water heating energy usage.  I had also been conscious of my water usage in the kitchen and only use hot water when I need hot water.  I almost dislocated my shoulder patting myself on the back.  Her response was a little different.  She told me she was taking longer showers since she knew, no matter how long she stayed in there, we wouldn’t run out of hot water.

And there you have it.  Given the same situation, two completely different conclusions.  Peg’s conclusion isn’t necessarily a bad conclusion.  It won’t raise our bills since what we’re saving in “standing losses” will be offset by higher “demand” costs, but it is diametrically opposed to my goal of pinching pennies.

When we make any decision we need to make sure we agree on what the end state is.  Is the goal to save money or is it to provide more service or is it to do both. Some of that has to do with worldview but part of it has to do with those who will always set aside logic and common sense if their “feelings” disagree with reality.  But that’s a discussion for a future chapter.

Chapter 51, The ORI

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It’s been ten weeks since retirement and I’ve had some time to reflect on the things I miss and the things I don’t.  At the top of the “don’t miss” list is the dreaded ORI.  For those of you who aren’t, or haven’t been, in the military, an ORI, or Operational Readiness Inspection, is a process devised to determine if an organization is capable of executing its war time mission.  It sounds pretty simple in theory but somehow they can never seem to get the process quite right.

When I started out in SAC (Strategic Air Command) it was all pretty straight forward.  During the Cold War our mission was to nuke whoever decided to attack us back to the stone age.  We had to be able to accomplish this at a moment’s notice with no opportunity to spool up prior to employment.  Launch within minutes, fly for a very long time, and drop/launch a bomb bay full of crowd pleasers.  Pretty straight forward.  And that’s the way the ORI happened.  The inspection team would arrive with no advance notification and we would generate all of the aircraft on base and fly them all on a mission simulating the end of the world as we know it.  You either dropped the bombs on target or you didn’t.  Pass or fail, it was pretty clear-cut. That was then. Now things are a little more complicated.

The world changed and the ORI process tried to change with it but it became mired down in everything but evaluating the primary mission of a flying wing.  It became more about operating in the, never seen but much feared, chemical warfare environment and bureaucratic minutiae than in the reality of how we’ve operated during the last three wars.  It hasn’t really kept up with that paradigm shift. There have been some efforts to fix the process but little success.  The best example, in my experience, was back in 1999.

I had just arrived at Youngstown as the new Ops Officer of the 773rd Airlift Squadron.  It was my dream job.  I had always loved being in the thick of things and the Ops Officer gets to run the day to day operations of a flying squadron.  There were new challenges, new problems, new taskings every day.  It never stops and that’s what I loved about it. Several months after I arrived on base, the senior leadership attended an Air Force Reserve Command Senior Leaders Conference down in Georgia.  It’s a weekend of briefings, networking and getting to know your counterparts around the command.  One of the briefings was from the newly appointed IG (Inspector General) at Headquarters Air Mobility Command (AMC).  He stood up and boldly described his vision for the new ORI process. His new construct would be centered around mission execution.  There would be a small chemical warfare exercise in the middle of the three days but after several simulated attacks over a 8-12 hour period we would pack up the gas masks and move on to other, more timely, scenarios. The crowd was thrilled.  Finally someone with half a brain and some common sense was in charge of the process.  My wing commander stood up and volunteered the 910th to be the canary in the mine.  We were ready and willing to try out the new improved process and maybe even having a say in working out the bugs.

We prepared for months.  We practiced with our partners, the active duty guys out of Little Rock, and when the day of deployment arrived, we were more than ready.  But that’s when things started going terribly awry.  As soon as we arrived at the inspection site, the scenario put us into a potential chemical warfare environment. It was a little odd since you would usually have 12 hours or so to build bunkers, unload cargo, and set up operations before having to suit up in chem gear but I concluded that they were just going to get the chemical exercise out of the way early.  That concept worked for me.  I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

For the next three days we did little else but dive into bunkers, put on our gas masks and trudge around the base like space aliens.  At one point we had the masks on for nearly 8 hours straight and as we were packing up to redeploy we were still in chem gear.  We even had to react to a chemical attack while we were in the passenger holding area waiting to get on an airplane to go home.  I wasn’t happy.  I took some time to cool down, but the next week I wrote an after action report which I upchanneled through 22nd Air Force to AFRC.  As you all know, I’ve never been one to hover long over send.

A month later we flew to HQ AMC at Scott AFB for a face to face sit down with the IG to discuss our thoughts on how the new system worked.  When it was my turn to speak I simply passed out my report and said to the O-6: “What you told us at the AFRC Senior Leaders Conference was the exact opposite of what actually happened.  I can come to only two conclusions.  Either you lied to the faces of 300 people or you are incapable of managing your staff and are incompetent.  Neither speaks well of you or the United States Air Force.”  I sat down and the meeting continued.  Maybe not the smartest thing to say to an O-6 as an O-5 in front of your O-7 boss.  I guess I needed more time to cool down.

Years later I was talking to one of the ancient civilian, former military staffers in the IG office, a guy that had been there for decades, and in a moment of accidental honesty, he told me that; “We get these new bosses all of the time who come here with new ideas.  They try to rock the boat and change things but we know if we just slow roll it they’ll be gone in two years and we can just keep doing things the way we know how”. And that’s it.  That’s the problem with all bureaucracies. The inertia of “the way we’ve always done it” prevents real change and real efficiency.  What was the last problem a government bureaucracy solved?  What’s the motivation for any bureaucracy to fix a problem?  Altruism?  You know better than that!  We’ve spent trillions to eliminate poverty but the poverty rate is unchanged.  We just make staying in poverty more comfortable.  Throw more money at a problem, you just get more of the problem.

One more thing on ORIs.  I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in the Air Force.  Some people seem to get stuck with ORIs more than others.  I know an O-6 who, in over 30 years in the air force, has never been through an ORI.  He has either transferred from a unit just prior to one or to a unit right after they had one.  On the other hand, some of us get just the opposite.  In the first case it could just be that all of his bosses were wise enough to hide him!