Hurry Up and Wait

If you have been in the Army longer than two seconds, you know that the Army motto is not "An Army of One." It's "Hurry up and Wait." It seems like everything in the Army takes ten times longer than it does anywhere else, especially if it something that will benefit you personally in any way. Example: the Army pulls half your pay, saying you owe the Army money for lost equipment. This is because some fuck nut has put the wrong social security number into the computer and completely messed with your pay. Finance says they will fix it, no problem. Now the paperwork saying you owed money took like five days to process. It took 3 months to get that money back! Hurry up and wait!

But now I find myself wondering if maybe the Army shouldn't have something a bit more encompassing for their motto, like "Fly by the Seat of your Pants" or something. Case in point, my husband's mid-tour leave dates have been moved up, moved back, cancelled, and shifted more times than I can count. I found out Friday that he'll be here as early as Tuesday?? Hello and fuck me sideways! When the hell did this change happen? My husband found out himself on Friday. So now I have 4 days to clean my house, figure out what I'm going to do with the kids while I go to the airport because their father doesn't want them to be there to pick him up, deal with the psycho in-laws (who are STILL pissed off at me and said "uh-huh" when I told them he was coming home), and attempt to maintain my sanity. Great.

And what really annoys me in all this is that it blind-sided me! I am an idiot. How long have we been in the Army now? You would think I would know better by now than to put too much stock in any kind of Army scheduling. Like the weather in Ohio, if you don't like it, wait a minute--it'll change!