The CDC just reinstituted masking and as one of a very few unshot folks, I have to test every week to go into the lab. The DoD still has me on a no travel status. This may be my last year of service. I hit 20 years a few months ago. I will probably defer retirement at the end of this year. Pension won't start for another 12 years at the amazing sum of $24k a year, but even if I stayed in for the extra 10 years, it would only increase to about $42k a year. The pension sytem isn't quite what people think about government employees. It is 1% per year of service with a kicker at 30 years of service for 1.1% per year (33%). The shock is that there is no one to replace me. I have been the only one for over 10 years, since my mentor retired. In 10 years, we haven't found one single person for me to train as a replacement. Several started, but they quit after a year or two. The workload and the lack of return is just a hard sell.
People do surprising things when they're about to lose a key component to their core operations. Hopefully you get a better offer or a better opportunity outside of DoD.
I'm just tired. Exhausted by red tape and the accelerating decline of our military and our communication systems. My job gets more and more depressing every time I go to a ship. Every once in a great while, I will encounter a good sailor that is receptive to teaching. In 20 years on the ships, there are only two that I would hire. Hundreds of sailors in twenty years and only two that I truly think are capable and have the potential to be my replacement. Since I haven't been traveling, they have been removing the amplifiers and controllers from the ship and shipping them to me to rebuild, troubleshoot, align and ship back. They are coming to me in pieces that look like they have been maintained with a hammer. They are old tech that we have lost the technology and can't replicate it. The designers created a hybrid transformer combining system that works without resistive power loss. Today, we can only make resistive combining that costs 50% of our generated power to combine two signals. It is a shame, but Harris tried to copy the system, but they ended up saying that it was impossible and that it can't possibly work. Funny, it has been working for over 40 years on multiple ships.
The CDC just reinstituted masking and as one of a very few unshot folks, I have to test every week to go into the lab. The DoD still has me on a no travel status. This may be my last year of service. I hit 20 years a few months ago. I will probably defer retirement at the end of this year. Pension won't start for another 12 years at the amazing sum of $24k a year, but even if I stayed in for the extra 10 years, it would only increase to about $42k a year. The pension sytem isn't quite what people think about government employees. It is 1% per year of service with a kicker at 30 years of service for 1.1% per year (33%). The shock is that there is no one to replace me. I have been the only one for over 10 years, since my mentor retired. In 10 years, we haven't found one single person for me to train as a replacement. Several started, but they quit after a year or two. The workload and the lack of return is just a hard sell.
People do surprising things when they're about to lose a key component to their core operations. Hopefully you get a better offer or a better opportunity outside of DoD.
I'm just tired. Exhausted by red tape and the accelerating decline of our military and our communication systems. My job gets more and more depressing every time I go to a ship. Every once in a great while, I will encounter a good sailor that is receptive to teaching. In 20 years on the ships, there are only two that I would hire. Hundreds of sailors in twenty years and only two that I truly think are capable and have the potential to be my replacement. Since I haven't been traveling, they have been removing the amplifiers and controllers from the ship and shipping them to me to rebuild, troubleshoot, align and ship back. They are coming to me in pieces that look like they have been maintained with a hammer. They are old tech that we have lost the technology and can't replicate it. The designers created a hybrid transformer combining system that works without resistive power loss. Today, we can only make resistive combining that costs 50% of our generated power to combine two signals. It is a shame, but Harris tried to copy the system, but they ended up saying that it was impossible and that it can't possibly work. Funny, it has been working for over 40 years on multiple ships.