Screwed for the Month

So I worked my butt off all of August to find some people to enlist in the Army National Guard. Thought I had some things going, thought I could take things easy - the contracts will land in my lap like my last 6 did, right? Wrong.

Coming into the last week of the month I had only one processor - and need 2 to finish my yearly mission that ends in September. I need at least 1 to stay at mission. I'm assuming that all 5 of my readers read SFC B's and Station Commando's blogs so I won't be explaining any terms for now. Anyway I am really good at pre-screening my applicants and haven't lost an applicant at MEPS in well over a year. While I haven't totally lost the applicant, I'm not very happy with the MEPS Doc right now.

My kid had to work Monday night so he couldn't go down that night like normal. So, being the good recruiter that I am, I left my office at 1am on Tuesday morning to pick my guy up and drive him to MEPS by 5:30am. Got there at 5, made sure he knew what to expect and figured I'd be ready for another enlistment. When I'm at MEPS I try to help out our Guidance Counselors as much as possible, so I did some paperwork to help out the Senior Guidance Counselor as much as I could. I needed to get some sleep so I could survive the ride home so I went to our day room at MEPS to sleep on the couch for a couple of hours.

At noon my cell phone wakes me up and it's one of my recruiting team mates asking my why my guy isn't off the floor. I go down to our office at MEPS to find out what's going on. I'm told there is something wrong with my guy's eyes and that he'll probably need a consult - so I tell them I'll drive him myself and leave to grab him and bring him to the consult. Suddenly my guy is nowhere to be found. The front desk doesn't know where he is and medical doesn't seem to know either. Finally at 2pm - TWO HOURS LATER - he walks off the floor. At this point I know I'm not going to get an enlistment today because the doctor leaves at 2:30pm so all consults must be back by then. My only hope is that his consult is in the next day or so. Apparently MEPS realized that they haven't screwed me in a while so they made sure I wouldn't make mission this month - my guy's consult is scheduled for SEPTEMBER 14th! Over half a month away! What the hell? To make matters worse the sheet you get describing the disqualification doesn't even say what exactly is wrong with him. His physical shows that his vision corrects to 20/20 but it says he needs an Ophthalmology consult none-the-less. We're still trying to find out what the deal is from Medical so I can bring him to a civilian eye doctor instead of waiting till Sept 14.

SFC B recently complained about MEPS Guidance Counselors and I have to admit I don't have any problems like him. The GCs at my MEPS are nothing but some of the finest and most helpful soldiers I've ever had the opportunity to work with. These guys will bend over backwards to make sure that you get an enlistment. If you screw up, you'll get a nice stern talking to, but in the end they make sure your guy can process. I've honestly never had a problem with my MEPS GCs. What I do have problems with is the MEPS Doc and the rest of the medical staff. It seems that when you need an enlistment the most, they find the dumbest reason to disqualify an applicant. Kind of like the time I had an applicant temporarily disqualified because he MIGHT have an ear infection. His DQ sheet actually said that. It didn't say that he DID have an ear infection, but that he MIGHT. I kind of thought that if you have your PHD in medicine, that you'd know if a person had an ear infection or not. The funny thing is that when my NCOIC called me to yell at me about it he actually said, "Didn't you look at his ears before you left for MEPS?" My response was, "I'm sorry MSG, I guess when I went to recruiting school they forgot to issue me my PHD." I think he realized how dumb of a question that was after I gave my sarcastic comment.

So now I'm going into September 1 behind mission. I'm told I need to have my mission finished by the 15th of September. I am confidant that I can pull this off, assuming my guy isn't permanently disqualified. That means I need to find 1 more, 2 to be +1 for the year. We'll see what happens.....

School starts next week so on top of trying to process qualified applicants, I've got to go to all 7 of my schools and deliver all the school supplies. Should make for an interesting month.

-Guardsman