Once upon a time in the Army, our masters at V Corps in Germany would produce a memo every Tuesday, instructing all subordinate units what was expected and required of them the by Friday of following week. This memo would be duplicated, with appropriate numbers of copies placed in each directly subordinate unit’s mailbox cubby.
Our Brigade would pick up their mail on Mondays. (Notice that Monday, in this context, falls nearly a week after Tuesday.) They would then place our memo in our cubby in their mailroom. 40 miles away from us. I picked up our mail on Thursdays, and returned it to our Battalion in the afternoon.
Thursday is Sergeant’s Time, when every unit closed early, by decree of the Corps Commander.
Every Friday morning, the Platoons were told by the Companies what they had to get done before close of business. This normally consisted of a whole series of tasks that were generally expected to take 2 or maybe 3 days to accomplish.
Every week went the same. Every Friday was a madhouse of stress and pulling things from our posteriors to satisfy arbitrary requirements in insanely short timeframes.
We got good at it. We got really good at it.
One year, the Corps held an awards ceremony, inviting every major subunit (Battalion and above) commander. We eventually received our invitation to this gathering, along with our award, a week after it occurred. Go figure.
We received a unique, double-sided award plaque. On one side was an award for being the best unit in the Corps at making things up as we went along. On the other side was an award for being the worst unit in the entire Corps at planning anything in advance.
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