I Am The Law

Working with the military, friends come and go as tours of duty begin and end. Initially I had difficulty accepting this rapid turnover and would get quite upset but now after 7 years it’s virtually a case of turn up at the leaving do, shake their hand and say “OK then, see ya!”

Occasionally you get people that you get close to and the goodbyes get harder. I’ve recently had to wave goodbye to Dave and Julie and their gorgeous cats Chester and Kensington. Dave was the First Sergeant for my squadron and was a good mate and confidant. My husband nursed his Porsche back to health after a long illness (just one of his many talents, among wall building, welding, plumbing, computer genius, CAD work) and Dave’s generosity in payment kept our heads above water while my husband was unemployed.

There must be something about the name Dave because another Dave that I knew was hard to say goodbye to a few years ago. He should have arrived home again in California today after 15 months away from his lovely family on what’s called a “remote assignment” in Turkey. Most tours with the US Air Force are undertaken with your family in tow but with remotes the military member goes unaccompanied. As I understand it remotes are in places that are either too dangerous or too alien to take a civilian family to. They're off to Hawaii next so they had to endure the tough assignment before scoring the holy of holies.

Dave was a “pointy head” avionics whiz who worked in a microelectronics laboratory but he was assigned to a staff job in Quality Assurance at the same time that I was a Technical Order Distribution Officer – I procured, tracked, distributed and inspected all technical data required for maintaining F-15s and their support equipment and for flying them too. He’s retrained into Intelligence now and I’m sure he’s heard all the jokes before so I’m not even going to mention the one about not usually seeing the words Intelligence and Dave in the same sentence.

I thought of Dave as younger brother. Or a puppy. He was always dragging back some booty that he’d managed to dig up from somewhere, and dancing around all knees, elbows and big feet with his tongue hanging out excited about what he’d pulled off. I’m sure he’s grown out of that by now … maybe.

He also fed my Sour Skittles addiction – best not dip too much into that murky period, I was different person when I did Skittles.

One afternoon I was sitting working at my computer when a message flashed up saying that I was being monitored. I couldn’t carry on working while the message remained so as there was an “OK” button in the message I pressed it and it went away.

A minute later it happened again so I thought I’d better get the computer dude down to see what was going on – I wasn’t particularly concerned about being monitored, you sign a user agreement before you’re allowed a network account that says you’re likely to be monitored and as I hadn’t heard of chatrooms, Ebay and blogs back then I was reasonably compliant. I was worried in case it was some kind of virus, so off I went.

Before I got out of the door I couldn’t help but notice Dave curled up in hysterics on the floor.

It took him a full 5 minutes to tell me what he was laughing about because he was laughing so hard and it turned out that he’d learnt how to send messages through the network that pop up on the screen. He’d set me up. Hmm, time to neuter that puppy.

A few weeks went by when the perfect opportunity came along to play the joke on one of the other guys in the office, Jamie. Jamie had acquired a whole load of old .exe arcade type games. Needless to say those games are verboten on a military computer.

Jamie was busy at his desk playing Frogger and had a couple of other guys, his supervisor included, standing behind him when I sent the message through the network direct to his screen that OSI – The Office Of Special Investigations, the US Air Force's Secret Police was "watching his illegal activities".

Jamie totally freaked out – unsurprising really as he was waiting to go to Officer Training School in preparation for retraining as a fighter pilot. An OSI investigation would undoubtedly cost him his new career.

He started to shutdown his system. I managed to keep a straight face long enough to ask what was wrong but I couldn’t contain my laughter for long so I left and went to the office next door. While I was in there giggling hysterically the computer guy came in and asked me what was going on. With a stroke of genius he decided to go storming into my office and told Jamie that he was impounding the computer. He promptly dismantled everything and took it away leaving poor Jamie wondering what was going to happen next.

He got as far as explaining to the Group exec about what happened (the exec was playing along as he twigged that there was foul play afoot) and was prepared to go and talk to the Group Commander before he found out that it was all a big joke. But don’t feel too sorry for Jamie folks – he had that shock coming to him for a looooong time.

Welcome home Dave!! If you’re reading this I thought you’d like a trip down Memory Lane.