My Community

My Coast Guard Engineering group, NESU Seattle, is a community. I look at our group every Monday afternoon at quarters and see Mechanical Technicians, Damage Control, Electrician Mates, Gunners Mates, Electronic Technicians, Chiefs, and Officers listening to our Commanding Officer updating us on what our future holds. We are all leaders of our field in engineering who have been brought together under one roof to achieve a common goal, coordinate and complete required maintenance for forty ships along the west coast. The resources to do our jobs are shared between shops in order to cut cost of contracting and tools, our processes are the same to obtain resources and communicate with our customers, and we are all guided in business by the Coast Guard’s core values of “Honor, Respect, and Devotion to Duty”. At the deck plate level, the Chiefs organize and guide work and processes while the Officers are our connection to headquarters and changes affecting the CG in general. Rank structure provides a structured process for decision making and communication through the community but often can become confrontational due to the non-equality of training, experience, and general personality traits of some individuals especially when things are going wrong. For some examples, many junior enlisted personnel have degrees that well exceed the minimum to be an Officer but choose to stay enlisted and often a brand new officer will be “put in charge” of senior enlisted personnel who have twenty plus years of experience, yet Officer’s tend to respond more to bad decisions suggested from their operational senior command then the right solutions from their lower ranking engineering personnel.

I’m the Senior Chief for 30 Mechanical Technicians, which is the largest group inside the community, and I provide personnel with guidance, training, resources, and coordination with other groups inside the community. I love being a part of this team because it allows me to use my imagination and forces me to be creative. Accomplishing jobs with limited resources that save the organization time and money and having the ability to influence junior personnel who are the up and coming future of our organization is very rewarding to me. My influence and resources touch not only the members at work, but allow me to help them at home with their families when they are having problems. My people must have their personal lives in good order so that they pay attention to detail in the work place otherwise failures are imminent. We have rules, traditions, and personal values that I truly identify with, we assist each other when we need help, we talk the same language about the same problems, and we are closer to each other than most families are.

What's in your wallet?

A detective stands behind the tape of the crime scene and looks down at item flagged as #10 near the edge of the snowy embankment. He puts out his cigarette and snaps his gloves into place as he bends over to pick up the old black wallet from the ground. He slowly walks toward the squad car for light assistance from the headlights as he opens it up to see what it contains. He lays the contents out on the hood of the car and starts to look at each piece individually.

First he looks at my drivers licence with the expiration date of MILITARY which coincides with my military ID and the two dependant ID's from two of my sons, my military emergency contact numbers card and my government driver's license. Obviously, I'm in the military with height of 6'3" and 220 lbs, 38 years old, brown eyes and hair. Next he puts my government visa, my VIP Hlton Honor card, World Mark vacation card and my airline cards together and figures I must travel quite often. He glances briefly at my Borders cash card and deducts that I must buy books for all the traveling time. Next he groups my hydraulic formula card, my air conditioning and refrigeration license, and my air conditioning troubleshoting card together seeing I must be some type of engineer. The next grouping gives him some humor and some confusion as he groups four bank cards, five credit cards, a costco card, a safeway card, and a community vanpool card making him wonder why a guy that looks like he spends money would waste his time with these little saving incentives. Lastly, he sees a picture of my son Billy, a current student card for Everett Community College, and an ASB card from graduation year 1989 and for the first time, the detective is scared. What kind of sick individual holds on to his ASB card for 21 years!
The wallet told him many things, but not any that are too important to me. It did not tell him I am raising five boys and one girl. It did not tell him how I was freshly married to an awesome woman. It did not tell him who I really was to the military, the men that trust me there, or how long I've been there. The wallet could not explain how overloaded I feel sometimes with work, family, and my new school work load and why I just had to stop at that spot earlier in the day and go sleding to clear my head before the crime even happened. Even though the sleding was fun, it did not help that I lost my wallet.