My Captain Story

 At some point in my vault-career....I worked with a Captain, who'd been as a kid in Columbia....gone to the US....gotten citizenship, and gone to medical school as a mental health guy.

We sat one afternoon and he laid out his situation.  After med school....he'd gotten picked up for a mental clinic in Miami.....making probably double what he was making as a Captain.  He was....however....unhappy.

His focus by the clinic director....was to take mostly married female patients...ages 40 to 60, and listen to their woes for an hour every two weeks, and if they were out of happy pills....issue more.

I asked what the problem was.

He responded.....they all had hit some peak in their thirties....married to men who found as 'problems'.  He was there to mostly hear the stories, erotic thrills with the tennis instructor, or some indepth fantasy.  

After 18 months of this....he told the director that something had to change.  Well...the director responded.....this was the top-money maker of the clinic.  Anything of a change meant a paycut.  A month later....the guy walked into a recruitment office and signed up for the Air Force.  He told the recruiter bluntly.....absolutely no medical jobs.  Fine...the Air Force saw that he was a great Spanish speaker and got him into the vault-profession.  

He admitted....if he'd just stayed, he'd probably be retired by age 50.  But this was just not a place where you wanted to hear about woes every single day.  

I look around today, and I see a lot of guys/gals.....unhappy....with no angle to improve things.

Calculator Story

 There's a test you take to get into the military.  Various scores come out of this....indicating if you are smart enough, and which fields should be open to you, or forbidden for you.

So, for all these years.....there was a math related set of questions on this ASVAB test.  

Example, if you had three quarts of fuel, in a one-gallon can.....how full was it?  30-percent, 50-percent, 75-percent, or 100-percent.

This portion of the test.....I considered simple (1976 testing).  You didn't use a calculator, and I breezed through the ten-odd questions with ease.  

Well....the Pentagon has decided that entry failures are bad enough.....that they are issuing out calculators for the ASVAB test.

I pondered upon this.  In using the calculator, you'd have to have a formula in your head to start with.  You'd have to know just what a quart really means or compares to a gallon.  I'm pretty sure in a class of 25 kids.....17 years old....that half of them have no idea of the quart angle to gallon angle.  So handing the marginal IQ  kid the calculator really doesn't mean much.

It'd be like asking a kid how many feet in a mile (5240 ft), and what 10-percent of the 5240 amount relates to, and if running 5 ft per second....how far would you get in 1,048 seconds (answer: a mile)?  There might be five kids out of 25....who'd get the formula right, within a minute.

Somehow, the Pentagon believes easing up.....will get more low IQ kids to pass ASVAB, and possibly enter the military.

I pondered upon this logic.   You'd end up in three years....with probably 100,000 low-IQ types in the Navy, Army, and Air Force.  'Sarge' would be standing there and shaking his head.....having to deal with this quality problem on a daily basis.

Who do I blame for this issue?  The high school education system, low quality teachers filtering into it, and graduating 18-year old kids who are marginally at the 7th-grade level.  

Thank God that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming.  AI will be able to tell stupid Airman Jones or Private Marty....what to do.