Why I Don't Miss the DoD

    If you have never served in the military then you have missed out on one of the biggest frustrations of your lifetime. The DoD is the most bureaucratic system imaginable. Nothing can be done without  approval from multiple links in the chain of command and at least five pieces of paperwork with signatures from sponsor, supervisor, commander, and a variety of others.
    You can probably imagine that there's a story behind all of this. About a month ago, more than three years after being injured, I get an email from some AF accounting office saying that I need to file the travel voucher from my deployment……are you kidding?
    Not only has it taken three and a half years for this to come to light,

but they had no idea I had been injured or came back early. Completely clueless. Not to mention I had been told just a couple months after being injured that everything had been taken care of. I should have known better ha ha. I didn't sign the required 49 pages!
    So they start sending me forms for lost receipts and what not that we fill out and send back and after getting the wrong form from them a couple times we finally got everything sent out and taken care of.
    Last week I got two emails, one after the other, same day, almost same time. These are my first and second notices of payment from the DoD. Apparently I owe them $140 for my deployment. Excuse me? That trip didn't turn out so well and I think I should be reimbursed in full not made to pay!!! I'm just playing though. It will be nice to have all this done with.
    You might think cutting a check to the AF would be simple right? Well, not when the DoD is running the show. I have to fill out al my personal information, rank, majcom, and some others. Then, when the printer is trying to pump out the three page payment agreement it craps out and now we can't print at all. Thanks for murdering my printer Air Force.
    I can pay every other bill in my name with a simple phone call and all I have to do is answer a few questions. Why does the DoD need to make this so much more difficult than it needs to be? There should be no room for bureaucratic BS in any of the government let alone the DoD…..and my broken eyes should just work when I wake up tomorrow since I'm dreaming here.

    So now that all this is off my chest I can go about my day NOT submitting my payment to the DoD.

Doing this instead.

God bless!