Alright, I’m back in the saddle.  For those of you who care, Cotton Patch Gospel is going great with only three performances left.  Friday, 11 Oct @ 7:30 and Saturday 12 Oct @ 2:00 and 7:30.  If you have any questions, from the audience perspective, I’m sure Stan George will fill you in!  Thanks for coming Stan!

It occurred to me the other day that there is a large percentage of the population that has little or no understanding of how bureaucracies actually work and why they’re so potentially dangerous.  For the most part, you never really have to interface with them on a day to day basis until you start getting older or you work for an agency of the government.  Sure, we all have to deal with the IRS, state and local tax collectors, and the DMV, but you really can’t grasp the true nature of bureaucracies until you’ve aged a bit and run into the immovable force of the barely competent that makes up the federal government. Or as Dr. McCoy said it in Star Trek, “The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe”.

As I’ve certainly mentioned before, I attended UPT (Undergraduate Pilot Training) at Laughlin AFB, Del Rio TX.  Peg and I became engaged a year before I started UPT and we decided it would be best if we set a date for the wedding after I graduated.  Her spanish skills are non-existent and we decided that I would have enough stress in my life without being a newlywed at the same time.  So, for the whole year of training, my input into the wedding planning involved talking to Peg on the phone every Saturday and dutifully agreeing with all of her wedding plans or, at the very least, saying “Does Hartman care?”  A rhetorical phrase I picked up from one of my instructors.  However, I did have one very critical function in the planning process and that was graduating on time.

At  the time I really didn’t grasp how easy it was to “wash back” a class and not graduate on time.  Even a minor injury could keep you from flying for several weeks and you’d find yourself delayed a month.  Bad weather, broken airplanes, busted checkrides, all of these things or combinations could wreak havoc with wedding plans but contingency planning wasn’t really part of our thought process.  Luckily, other than some really bad weather in January which forced us to fly 7 days a week in February, everything stayed on track for graduating on 4 August and an 11 August wedding date.  That is, until the bureaucracy stepped in.

There was a lovely woman who worked in the personnel office at Laughlin who had worked there for many years.  When you were about four months from graduation she would brief the class about follow on assignments and schools.  She was in charge of scheduling your life after UPT and she had figured out how to avoid all of the pitfalls of system and she had done it for decades for thousands of students.  I remember clearly her asking if there was anyone in the class that needed to take some leave after graduation before their next school.  I fully understood my role in the wedding plan so I rushed to the front of the room after the briefing and explained that I was getting married exactly one week after graduation and that I needed at least a total of two weeks off before my next school.  She smiled, congratulated me, thanked me for letting her know, and made a note.  I had fulfilled my duty, mission complete.

I think it was the first week of July when our orders came down.  I actually go mine before anyone else in the class and I was anxious to see how the next three schools would flow out.  I opened the manila envelope and panic set in.  She had, indeed, made sure that I was available for my wedding on the 11th of August, but she had scheduled me to report to survival school at Fairchild AFB, WA on the 12th of August.  A honeymoon of trudging through the woods and being smacked around in a POW camp with 30 other guys.  Good times!  I was, to say the least, a little perturbed.  I found the office of the lovely lady from personnel and I, the lowly 2nd Lt, politely asked her what had happened.  She looked up from her desk,  immediately recognized me, and then proceeded to tell me that it had worked out better for her scheduling to do it that way and that I could at least get married.  She said it all with a smile on her face and ended it with a curt “Sorry”.  Well, I figured, it is what it is.  I serve at the whim of the Air Force.  So, with my head hung low, I headed back to the squadron.  All the while trying to figure out how to break the news to Peg.

I guess I was a little distracted the rest of the day because my instructor, Bill (Buck) Vrastil finally asked me why I was so uncharacteristically forlorn.  I told him my sad story and he leapt from his chair and stormed out of the room.  Ten minutes later my flight commander and squadron commander called me into the office and asked me to tell them the story.  They had a similar reaction. As the squadron commander left the office he told me he was going to see the wing commander.  I tried to stop him.  I didn’t want to make waves. I didn’t want to buck the system.  I didn’t want the bureaucracy to get mad at me.  He told me something that I have taken to heart my whole career but which flies in the face of everything I’ve seen from the federal bureaucracy since then, “We don’t treat people this way!”.

Within an hour the wing commander and the “lovely lady” from personnel had both called me and apologized for what she had said and done.  My orders were changed.  Survival school was rescheduled.   And Peg got a honeymoon.  She was still stuck with me, but she got a honeymoon.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There are caring compassionate employees in all systems but the further up in an organization you get the less personal and compassionate it gets.  People become numbers.  Customers become liabilities and problems.  The desire to solve the problem the system was created to address becomes secondary as the bureaucracy becomes a self-perpetuating “career building” organization.  History has proven it time and time again.  Maybe altruism gets the ball rolling but careerism and empire building take over.

That is why socialized medicine cannot ever work.  The middleman will just get bigger and bigger and absorb into the bureaucracy what should be going towards medical care.  If you really think adding another layer between you and your doctor will cut costs then you might need to take advantage of some of your mental health benefits.