Political Correctness

by Little Miss Attila on February 4, 2011

. . . kills people.

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

John February 4, 2011 at 4:54 am

It is an open secret in the U.S. military that performance reports are not worth the paper they are printed on, so that fact that Major Hassan’s reports are moonshine is not a surprise to those of us who have served.

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Foxfier February 4, 2011 at 7:46 am

I don’t know what Officer side is like, but Navy enlisted side from about E-4 and up (earlier, if your supervisor is lazy– er, I mean, if they want to help you get ready for being a petty officer!) you write your own eval, turn it in, and it might be slightly edited. I know a guy who was making a joke and put in that he was invaluable help in operation (something or other) that was a big move… in either WWI or Korea. It got clear up to his department head before the secretary got the joke.

Stuff like “was invaluable in restructure of material maintainer data”– means “I got annoyed at the morons throwing the repair records in a big pile and organized a filing cabinet”.

Submitting a poor eval, unless you’ve got a lot of paperwork from elsewhere so you can say “he came here screwed up,” tends to make you look bad as a supervisor, too.

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Curtis February 4, 2011 at 4:07 pm

Speaking as a supervisor for the navy I see the point but you may be interested to know that sometimes we really really liked the stuff that was handed in. I had a chief who put down that he was the head zymergist for the ship. I left it in and it went all the way. He was the Command Chief and finished out as a Master Chief. The other one I left in was from the OPS chief at my last station who had put in that he was a “one man force multiplier.” It was too good to scratch out and the commodore and COS agreed. Good man who was heading off for a 14 month IA in AF.

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Foxfier February 4, 2011 at 4:15 pm

*looks up zymergist*

Oh, my, I have GOT to share that with the guys…..

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John February 5, 2011 at 2:25 pm

Yeah, I did leave out the near-certainty that Major Hassan wrote the first draft of his eval, and the high possibility that what was signed by his reporting official was edited only to meet the i-dotting-and-t-crossing requirements (minimize white space, avoid yesterday’s cliches).

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