We Left the Lights On: Opportunity or Opportunity Cost?

I've mentioned it before, but when I returned from my last deployment (Spring 2013) I was thrust back into the very depot world that I tried to escape.

No amount of bellyaching or applications to overseas assignments or networking or incessant calls to AFPC could save me.

Notes:  This goes back to my "document everything" mantra; regardless, AFPC was ZERO help...shocking, I know.

Notes:  These are from before I left.  I love my take on the situation and my desire for an "exit strategy" (as if the depot was akin to Iraq) and my telling the bosses to "phone a friend".  Jesus, I was desperate!

So I pouted and moped around during my two weeks of reconstitution.  NOTE:  My attitude was further diminished throughout these 14 days as I tried frantically to complete my master's degree capstone before heading back to the gulag.  Um, I mean depot.

When the time came to return I did my best to stay positive and try to figure out what I was supposed to be doing since when I left I still had three-ish jobs and no real clue as to what depot maintenance was really all about.

Notes:  Ranging from my time as the Flight Test Commander, the assistant Deputy Group Commander, and the long-promised gig in F-22s

Looking back, I have to laugh at the heading to my notes:  Notes from the Underground.

I'll just get it out of the way now.  I am a nerd.  And I love Dostoyevsky.  Love.  Seriously.

His work, Notes from the Underground, is a series of ramblings from a retired civil servant who is both depressed and cynical with the current state of affairs in Russia.  The man is unknown to the reader and certainly mad or on the verge of madness.

I find this funny in retrospect because I suppose I felt the same way.  Mad.

I couldn't believe half the crap I saw and, inevitably, facilitated in the depot.  I mean it wasn't all bad, but there were certainly times when I just shook with anger or fear or both.

Notes:  Concerns from the Underground

It took me another nine months of complaining to land an interview with the group commander on the active-duty side of the base, which is really sick.  I was begging to work 12- to 14-hour shifts.  Mad, I say.  MAD!

I eventually escaped, but the damage was done.  I was done.  I dropped my paperwork and decided to choose myself.  Mad?  Not anymore.

In hindsight, maybe I should've titled my notes after Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which charts a single 24-hours in a gulag work camp.

Stay with me here.

I'm not trying to be cynical or overly dramatic, but Jeff Bridges ("The Dude") is right on when he quotes Solzhenitsyn and explains that we need both dark and light and perfection and imperfection to experience the fullness of life.

I now realize that I needed this experience.  I needed the dark (of the depot) to see the light (on the outside of the Air Force).  I needed some finches so I could be a swan...

...or a peacock.

But seriously, the above sums up my life right now.

At the end of the day I am thankful and grateful for my final depot experience.  Not only were the F-22 guys the best group of civilians in the entire Air Force Materiel Command, but they allowed me to see that being there wasn't at the cost of anything else, but for everything else.