Rhyme and reason have no place in the Army

Thursday, Nov. 30, 2006, 10:28 p.m.

As I knew they would, the stairs of yesterday came back to bite me in the ass of today. Great timing, too, since Thursdays are generally Manual Labor Day, here in Happyland. And since for PT this morning we got to partake in some delightful arm-melting (they call it an "upper-body workout," but I know its real purpose), I got to face said manual labor with not only stabby-muscle legs, but also useless-jelly arms. It's always something of a party around here.

The cause for today's heavy lifting was the brainchild of our commanding general, who is [eyes darting nervously around the Internet] THE BEST COMMANDING GENERAL IN THE ENTIRE ARMY. If you get my drift.

Today, we had to set up The Display.

The Display gets to be capitalized because any item so useless that it would cause, say, tonsils, to take pride in their job -- well, it deserves a little bit of special recognition. The Display was dreamed up by some genius who thought, probably simultaneously, "This Division needs some way to show off all the shit it's ever done, other than that entire museum over there which is dedicated to that very purpose," and "What in heaven's name am I ever going to do with all this money, aside from using it for something practical?"

Whoever this person was, his vision became reality in the form of a ten-foot-high, ten-foot(or so)-wide monstrosity consisting of many felt-covered, oddly-shaped walls, dozens of cheaply-framed photos, several extraneous lights and other other random electrical/technological equipment, all of which came handily packaged in fifteen (15) trunk-sized boxes.

Obviously, one might think now that our Division is the proud owner of such an extravagant piece of ... whatever it is, The Display should be set up somewhere on post for all the world to gawk at in mystified wonder and apathy. One might think. Alas, this is not the case. The Display's real purpose, as far as I have been able to tell, is to be set up and torn down (a feat usually requiring at least six people, three hours, a ladder and a rudimentary knowledge of electrical workings) in various places, never for more than a few days at a time, and rarely twice within six to eight months. The rest of the time, it sits in our storage container, taking up space that I would rather be using to store certain people's chopped-up bodies. However, at unexpected, fairly arbitrary times, we (the lackeys) are instructed to haul it out and set it up. Which brings us right back around to today.

Sometime in the past 36 hours, our BRILLIANT COMMANDING GENERAL decreed that a portion of The Display was to be set up in the lobby area of our post's main support center, and left there for, I imagine, eternity.

One of my co-workers and I (I'll call her Babymomma, because up until September, she had been fully pregnant for the entire time I'd known her) trudged out to the storage container, bearing naught but her smallish pick-up truck and a song in our hearts (the song, in case you're interested, was "SexyBack," which up until I first heard it a couple weeks ago, I thought was about Justin Timberlake's smokin' traps) to retrieve boxes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 14, plus some extra wall parts and a heavy cylindrical case. Our mission: to load them all in her truck without breaking ourselves or them.

I don't know for sure if there is a unit specifically set aside to measure pain, but if I may briefly make one up, I would estimate that the entire ordeal of loading boxes took about 58,327,463 kilofuckingOWs. Given the fact that we are both fairly short (5'4"-ish in sneakers) and the boxes are more than a little bit large and unwieldy, I can say with full confidence that I would rather have done pretty much anything else in the world with those 45 minutes.

After the loading-up came the setting-up, another adventure in and of itself, seeing as how The Display, in its new location, was clearly going to be an unavoidable fire hazard for anyone possessing the dexterity of less than your average Olympic gymnast. We set it up anyway, of course, against the ineffective protests of some civilian woman who appeared to be attempting to, I don't know, approach the matter sensibly.

"Just following orders!" we chirped blithely, as she wasted several moments of her own life trying to get us to understand the logic we had been instructed to ignore.

"But y'all cayun't put it thayure!" she whined indignantly. "Thayure's no room for people to walk!"

(As a side note -- don't you love it when people try to force you to agree with them about matters that you have absolutely no control over? Doesn't it just make you feel all warm and punchy inside?)

The moral of this story is: if the general abides by the laws of reason, not to mention the Fire Department, we will most likely be taking down The Display within the next few days, and all of today's painful, time-consuming work will have been in vain.

As always, life is good.

Here is the cure for, if you'll pardon the pun, a truly shitty day.