AKO

So there's not much to post until I ship, which is funny, because once I ship, I won't be able to post. It's a vicious circle.

But! I can tell you what's been going on since I signed my contracts:

The Army has this little website-thing called "Army Knowledge Online" which is essentially like, a website where you can.... view your pay stubs or... upcoming training or ... honestly I don't really know what else there is to do on this website. All I know is that I have to be registered on it before I arrived down at Ft. Benning at the end of next month.

Of course, knowing me, this isn't going to be a smooth process.

Two weeks ago I was told by my new recruiter, Sgt. OK that he was going to take care of registering me for the site. He said my info "should" be in the system within 48-72 hours from when I signed my paperwork.

Two weeks went by and nothing.

We'd been in email contact throughout the period, and eventually Sgt. OK delegated me to the task of getting registered. He gave me the website, the Help Desk phone number if I got stuck, and wished me luck.

Apparently he kept getting stonewalled at a certain point. Something to do with entering my DOB and my ship date.

So I gave it a go, and soon came across similar problems, prompting me to call the provided Help Desk number. After a short hold, I was speaking to a rep.

I explained what I, and my recruiter had been trying to do, and the tech support guy was more than willing to help... that is, until he found out I was running a Mac.

"Oh, oh no," he said. "Yeah, DoD computers are all Windows-based ... our web programs won't even talk to a Mac.... that's your problem."

Since I entered the Coast Guard I always wondered why our entire Department of Defense would use the most hacker-friendly computer operating systems.

But I knew there had to be more to this than what kind of computer I was on, since I imagine that my recruiters were using their Panasonic Toughbooks which have Windows-based operating systems.

I passed this along to Sgt. OK and asked if it was within OPSEC to try to log into this account via a public access terminal, like at the library. He said that should be fine, and wished me luck.

So the next day I went down to the local library and signed in for an hour session. I tried logging back in, but then ran into the same stonewalling problem. I stepped outside to make the phone call to the Help Desk.

What the guy NOW told me was that someone at MEPS probably entered in a wrong digit somewhere when they built my account.... between my DOB or ship date numbers; somewhere along the line, a 6 became a 7, a 0 a 1, and so on. I relayed this back to Sgt. OK who had a "long weekend" ahead of him.

"Ohh," it seemed to sort of dawn on him that this all could have been rectified with a simple phone call to MEPS weeks ago. He informed me that he'd be "right on it" first thing on Tuesday morning.

So, we'll see.