The Stuff I Wish I'd Known

[Atom_breaker]

Originally Posted by Temen

Sweepers, sweepers! Man your brooms!
This is especially true while you're student status. Waiting 2 months to class up? Well your work day will consist of 8 hours cleaning the barracks or school houses then.
.
.

...man. I figured that's what the downtime between schools would be. I was hoping to some kind of Admin TAD. Or time to take some college courses, (I forgot what the navy calls these online courses), but cleaning is fine with me. That's most of what my last job was anyways. Boss was a dust freak. I just considered it good practice for the Navy..

[Temen]

Originally Posted by Atom_breaker

...man. I figured that's what the downtime between schools would be. I was hoping to some kind of Admin TAD. Or time to take some college courses, (I forgot what the navy calls these online courses), but cleaning is fine with me. That's most of what my last job was anyways. Boss was a dust freak. I just considered it good practice for the Navy..

I can only speak for Pensacola's Aviation schools, so I'm not sure how other A-Schools are run. If your expected to be waiting for awhile, in Pensacola we were able to become barracks yeoman or duty section leaders. As a Yeoman we assisted the Barrack's Petty Officers (aka Military Training Instructors) with answering phones, taking care of paperwork, and being first line of support for students in the barracks. If you were a duty section leader, you took care of the watch bill and generally lead the cleaning evolutions and ensured the students in your duty section mustered and made it to their watches.

[Auridan]

So, I'm back from TAD. I come back to work on my own ship, and everyone wants to know what I got qualified in. What they're REALLY asking is, what PQS did I get signed off? I admit I'm not very good at gathering signatures, but I stood enough watches to have a decent idea of the stations in TOP, so my brain at least should be basically qualified. That answer got me a bunch of irritated looks, so I grabbed my PQS binder and held it out to the first available 2nd class to start signing.

It bothers me to no end that the paperwork is all they care about, and they don't even check that you know what the packet says you know. I could have spent my 3 weeks underway forging 8 different signatures and signing a whole novel of PQS off for myself, and I guarantee it would NEVER be checked, nor would I be asked to prove my knowledge. And when I do ask people to train me or test me, they give me only the most cursory information, dismissing my requests for something more in-depth with crap like, "You don't need to know that", "You're never going to use this", the ever-hated "You're nuking it", and my favorite, "You can't possibly remember all this stuff."

/rant

[Temen]

Originally Posted by Auridan

So, I'm back from TAD. I come back to work on my own ship, and everyone wants to know what I got qualified in. What they're REALLY asking is, what PQS did I get signed off? I admit I'm not very good at gathering signatures, but I stood enough watches to have a decent idea of the stations in TOP, so my brain at least should be basically qualified. That answer got me a bunch of irritated looks, so I grabbed my PQS binder and held it out to the first available 2nd class to start signing.

It bothers me to no end that the paperwork is all they care about, and they don't even check that you know what the packet says you know. I could have spent my 3 weeks underway forging 8 different signatures and signing a whole novel of PQS off for myself, and I guarantee it would NEVER be checked, nor would I be asked to prove my knowledge. And when I do ask people to train me or test me, they give me only the most cursory information, dismissing my requests for something more in-depth with crap like, "You don't need to know that", "You're never going to use this", the ever-hated "You're nuking it", and my favorite, "You can't possibly remember all this stuff."

/rant

That's one nice thing about using ASM to keep track of our quals, you can't forge signatures. You can still "gun deck" your quals and get a buddy to sign them off without ever discussing or doing practicals.
Still, I know the feeling of trying to learn the proper way and no one wanting to teach you. For my Apprentice, no one wanted to do the discussions and just told me to read the publications. I already did that in A-School and C-School! I might as well have just been automatically given it when I got to my first command. I always thought to reason for discussions was to bring in someone else's experience, not just read the publications on your own.