Some tricks I have picked up over the years for maintaining control of my emotions while deployed.
#1: get enough sleep. This is one is relatively personal to me, but if I can get at least 8 hours of sleep a day, my ability to be emotionally positive, mentally proactive and put up with stress is much increased. I read about a study not that long ago that advanced the idea that sleep deprivation causes an emotionally younger or child-like state (i.e., more prone to tantrums, less reasonable, etc.)
#2: goosefraube. I stole this from the movie Anger Management. This I just use when I catch myself getting spun up over a situation. I say "goosefraube" and try to just focus on the task at hand. (In think it is intended to sound German...which was the language I took in school, but that was a long time ago.) That or I use the line from Wedding Crashers: "I don't want to talk about last night, because it's just going to make me mad."
#3: trout. This I stole and modified from another source (A.I.), but I don't want to take the time to go into it here. This one is most effective in groups, and to understand how it works, you need a little background on a all too common problem: the stupid policy. For example, let's say your organization sends out a summary email on a certain topic every day. And this email goes to several different people or addresses. As virtually everyone who knows how to use email can tell you, it doesn't matter if you put an address in the To: line or the CC: line, the email will still arrive. Despite this, one of the listed orgs calls you angrily and demands that from now on, they be put in the To: line. The email still got to them, but they were on the wrong line. And all of the folks involved are sitting in the combat zone, and this is what they needed to pick up the phone and take 15 minutes of your time to talk to you about.
Trout comes in when your friend tells you this story in a room full of other people, all in the same squadron. Everyone in the room knows this is a stupid policy/act, and everyone agrees. And yet someone always plays the devil's advocate and speaks up (usually in jest) to defend the policy. When this happens, this person now becomes the proxy authority figure, and the victim of said policy unleashes all of their (righteous) anger on this flesh and blood effigy. The point is, it just pisses everyone off to have the conversation after describing the stupid policy. So when someone asks the leading question, such as, "Doesn't the email get to them either way?" The proper response to just say "Trout," and drop the whole conversation right there. I have found this tactic both extremely useful and extremely entertaining since my last rote, and spread it to new organizations I join so I can use it.
[Controlled detonation occurring outside the building right now as I type.]
I am using my mobile phone from home as my alarm clock. (I was somewhat hopeful it might find a network here to use (it's quadband GSM and unlocked with an international SIM), but no dice.) You have to use a battery powered alarm clock here because for some reason (some say converted 220V power), wired clocks gain a few minutes every day. Since I was already bringing my mobile phone, it saved space and weight in packing.
Military term of the day: dwell time/ dwell ratio. Dwell time is the amount of time you spend at home between deployments. Dwell ratio is the ratio of home time to deployed time. A dwell ratio of 2:1 would mean that for every month you spend deployed, you spend two at home. A lot of army troops are roughly at a 1:1 right now. All the stateside C-130 squadrons have been at 1:1 since OEF started in 2001.
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3 comments:
I'm one of those people who will ask to be moved lines in e-mail, and I have a totally legitimate reason:
I have rules which sort my e-mail for me, and I read e-mail based on where it gets sorted. Monthly e-mails from airlines/hotels, any e-mail with "OOO" in the subject line, and some e-mails from certain mailing lists go to a folder that I read maybe once a month, and then only to delete 99% of the contents. CC:'d e-mails get slightly higher priority than this. I don't have any alerts set up to let me know that something new is in my CC: folder, and I check it maybe every few days (whenever I have free time at work and think, "Hmm... haven't cleaned out the ol' CC: folder in a while...). Again, I skim through and delete probably 80% of things that are CC:'d to me.
So, if someone is routinely sending out an e-mail that I know I want to read reasonably soon after getting it, I have to be in the To: line, because it would completely defeat the purpose of pre-sorting my mail to open up the CC: folder to look for that e-mail. True, on any given day it would only take me 30 seconds to do that, but I'd have to remember to do it every single day, and it would also only take 30 seconds for the person sending the e-mail to change my name. (And they'd only have to do it once.)
Interesting. I was wondering if I might get a response from someone along these lines.
What email program do you use?
I can assure you, you are much more savvy than the average (or even above average) Air Force user, and you also have more time. I am somewhat familiar with rules in Outlook, but I rarely use them, because I can never depend on being at the same computer, and I don't like to spend the time to set up rules each time.
All this said, your point is valid, if the customer in question was using rules in such away. However, they weren't. Their feelings were hurt they weren't in the To: line. Their sole complaint was that they didn't feel important enough.
I use Outlook, which is (like every other Microsoft product) an amazing piece of software that is so incredibly configurable--the rules are an excellent example of this.
I think it's kind of amusing that people are hurt by being put in the CC: line, because where I come from, CC: kind of implies, "I know you probably get ten thousand e-mails and I don't want to waste your time with this measly bit of trash...".
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