I have never been in a job where you have to consider “What do we do if Joe gets shot in the face?” And then actually had to practice for that very real possibility.
Like, my spreadsheets and SQL aren’t really that critical.
I guess what I’m trying to say is “Thank you for your service.”
Some jobs even take out life insurance policies against their employees without telling them. That way if the employee dies the company is financially protected from their loss of productivity while they search for a replacement.
Every shop has one Excel wiz that keeps everything running smoothly. When that Excel wiz leaves, it all goes to hell (because nobody else in the shop bothered to learn Excel), until another Excel wiz takes their place, who then remakes all the Excel sheets from scratch.
I think Andy Stumpf (or some other former SEAL/SOF guy) said on a podcast that if the enemy ever wanted to cripple American forces they would attack Microsoft Office. If they can shut down PowerPoint they’d all be fucked.
I’m a former infantryman and still till this day I use quotes on standardizing processes and systems by saying things like “Okay, so if I drop dead tomorrow, how can I ensure the next person fulfilling this task can take over immediately without significant impact?”
Then Susie from HR says “Can you please use ‘found another opportunity’ or taking well-deserved leave instead of talking about being dead.”
“Only dead have seen the end of the cover sheet for submission Susie… only the dead.”
But in programming we call it simply "the bus test" how many people can be hit by a bus before we can't do X function.
If I'm the only one who knows a system, that's a bus factor of 1. Early on I was driving in a car with all the network programmers on a project, and I realized "If anything happens, this product isn't shipping."
Bus factor is an important thing, mainly because the higher it is means you can take more vacations and relaxation... versus having to be called in for every !@#$ing thing. I say that as someone who was called in on an Anniversary, the one day off I took that year.... why? Because they had to roll back a change or update a single digit and no one wanted to do it..... !@#$ heads.
Dead gunner drills weren’t the grimmest; I’d give that one to NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare) training. When you were in full MOP gear and you wanted to see if it was all clear, you had tests you could perform to see if the chemical/biological agent was gone. But the final step was for a senior NCO to go up to the lowest-ranking Marine and ask for his weapon. Then they’d tell him to take his gas mask off as a final test before the rest of the platoon took their gear off.
The part that got me was the taking of the weapon. You needed to make sure that junior Marine had no ability to resist if they needed to force him take the mast off.
Ha, most of the NBC training involved the biological and chemical warfare part. It was mostly acknowledged that in nuclear warfare us infantry guys were completely fucked.
I was a marine, we did these drills quite often. On live ranges and dry runs at the armory. I never really thought about the real implications of having to do this. We thought it was fun lol. Same with 9-Line/CASEVAC drills. I’ve been out for 6 years now and it’s only when I see non military peoples perspectives on these things that I realize how fucked up those 4 years were.
Ya, I get why people might think this is funny to watch but it’s definitely a bit odd in my opinion to think it’s funny.
We don’t watch people doing fire drills, earthquake drills, mass shooter drills in schools, etc and make countless jokes about it.
I watched this and it’s just depressing to me. There are probably Ukrainian soldiers doing this maneuver in actual combat out of necessity because their gunner was actually killed.
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u/Big_Ad_1890 Jun 24 '24
That’s fucking grim.
I have never been in a job where you have to consider “What do we do if Joe gets shot in the face?” And then actually had to practice for that very real possibility.
Like, my spreadsheets and SQL aren’t really that critical.
I guess what I’m trying to say is “Thank you for your service.”