Room Drama

If you take a bunch of otherwise peacable animals and put them in a box with limited activity and unlimited time to ruminate on that lack of activity, even the most even keeled individuals will eventually go crazy (kind of like our deployment setting). The extreme case of this is the psychological basis of sensory deprevation torture, under which even the strongest will crack.

The Drama which I am about to describe is a real world example of the above:

The characters:

Pictures and descriptions of Me, Greg, Glen, etc

Here is the setting -our box - also known as a MOD (multiple occupancy dwelling)















It is basically a long trailer home/manufactured home (only not built as well) with many rooms to the side of a main hallway. The bathroom/showers are at the end in a the smaller building you see above (complete with a pond and its own ecosystem where the shower drainage ends up due to plumbing problems).

Here is the drama:

In most of the units officers of our seniority and position don't bunk in the MODs, they have their own personal room (POD) and share a bathroom/shower with one other person (also in an individual room). Given the fact that the medical field is "top heavy" with officers and only a certain number of PODs are given to the medical squadron, we three majors (doctors) were assigned to room together.

(picture of our room)

Honestly I have no problem being in a "dorm style" room and I have enjoyed the opportunity to become good friends with Greg and Glen - that coupled with the fact that I don't care to be isolated has prompted me to elect to stay in the MOD even after a personal room with my name on it becomes available (scheduled next month). Having established the fact that I don't see myself as "above the masses" sets the stage for...

THE PROBLEM.

This is the source of the problem, a bent door with a near inoperable lock/latch mechanism prompting most of the occupants to utilize the "caveman vs. door" stragegy in exiting the MOD, followed by a concussive slam as the bent frame recieves the heavy metal door.

Picture of Greg with earplugs in asleep with pager on table

That door, combined with a high volume of foot traffic, has created a scenario where we have to have earplugs in to get any sleep - which makes it doubtful that we would be able to hear our pagers. Given that there are two surgeons (one real surgeon - Greg - and then me) on base, you would think that it would be important for mission readiness of a "forward surgical unit" to have those two aforementioned individuals available at all times. At least this all made sense to me at 0230 SUN morning when I decided that we needed to make a change.

The solution that my sleep deprived brain came up with was to switch our room for one of the rooms down the hall that was set aside for (and infrequently occupied by) transient personel. We would displace no one and would put ourselves in a place where we could sleep without earplugs (of obvious benefit to the three of us) and would help us maintain our readiness posture (something you would assume would be important to the powers that be). When morning came we went looking at the available room options (there were three) and selected a nice room with a view.





Actually this is the same view you see from every window - a concrete barier 3 feet away.
This all made good sense to us, at least to Greg and me - Glen was a bit concerned that someone might have a problem with our move. We started the move after church SUN afternoon (about 1630).
You can see that Glen - despite his aversion to moving in general, is putting on a "happy face" because he knows that we will all sleep better when we get to the other room.

Immediately it became evident that our optimistic outlook was flawed. We made such a racket during the move that the daysleepers were, and justifiably so, angry with the "prima-donna doctors that don't care about anyone but themselves." I thought that our timing was good and that everyone would be awake already, but it turns out that most of them don't get up until 1800 so they were very unhappy with us. To make matters worse, our first sergeant came over and started asking questions. Foremost among them was, "Who authorized this move?"
- Now the reality was that no one had officially authorized the move (though we had run it by the MOD chief) and we just assumed that it made sense, there was no reason to spend another night wishing we were in another room and we had time to make the move then.....so.....being men of action, we proceeded with our plan. - I explained all of this to the 1st SGT, who did not see things at all the way we did. His reply was that, "This is not the way it is done, and people will have problems with it!" I didn't realize that what he meant is, "I have a problem with it," and so I told him exactly what I thought (I'm sure that is a surprise) of the small mindedness of anyone foolish enough to disagree with me and how they could just deal with it. This opinion was not well recieved.

Compounding the problem is the fact that I didn't realize that he had responsibility for the room assignment situation (why a senior enlisted person should be in charge of my room is still beyond me) and so our circumvention of the process looked like we were going around him, which he didn't like one bit. We figured this all out over the next two days, but I was somewhat clueless at the time. As Greg mentioned, we are not to the point that we have become "institutionalized" men (from Shawshank Redemption), so some of the points of view of individuals that are institutionalized don't spring to mind when we are adressing an problem (like Greg hurting some folks feelings by working with the manpowerteam on techniques to get patients out of an MRAP). Anyway, we were most of the way done by the time he came by SUN evening, so we just finished the move and I figured that we would sort it all out on MON.

Imagine my surprise when, the next day, the EMEDS CC (read here Henry Blake - a very nice guy with little to no leadership ability) expained to me that one of the biggest problem was that we had offended the 1st SGT and that our "doing what we want without getting permission did not give us squatters rights on the room." When pressed I could not get him to even awknowledge that: 1) we had a reasonable complaint and 2) that it was ridiculous for his one trauma surgeon to possibly miss night time pages because he had to sleep with earplugs in! As if there is any other reason to have a "forward surgical unit" besides the ability to respond to surgical emergencies. He gave me a bunch of ideas like, "we could send a runner to get you guys." This is about when I realized that the folks that were supposed to be on our side were fixated on "fairness" (as if that has anything to do with the issue) and the "wrongness" of our circumvention of the "process" and the natural order of things. The obvious site of focus (in my view) should have been looking at the move as one in the best interest of our EMED's mission and its personnel. He decided that we needed to move back to the original room (as punishment for circumventing the process) and submit our request through the proper channels and give the process its time to work (an unspecified period of time which is heavily dependent on the motivation of those individuals who are part of the "due process").

The timing of this decision and its execution took a couple of days, so fortunately we had three nights of quiet bliss; sleeping the rest of the just - not feeling any guilt over the current state of the situation (even if others viewed us as malcontents and trouble makers:)).

In the meantime...we mended some fences by appologizing to all of our neighbors, who were gracious in acceptance and I think there are no hard feelings from the whole deal there.

As absurd as it seems, we were then required to spend another evening moving back into our original room and await word from services that we are "officially" allowed to change rooms(despite the fact that they could have done without the room that we squatted in for the past week)....
And I continue to lie awake late into the night, hoping that "due process" will surprise me and come more quickly than I have come to expect from the beaurocracy of military life.

In the words of my Kirtland AFB colleague, Jeff Bell (General Surgeon), "It's not the bad hours, it's not the poor pay, it's the endless disrespect!"