I'm sorry. I know this sub is mostly for active duty and retired, and you never give us civilian employees much thought. I wanted to start a dialogue and share perspective from my world, and maybe help you all understand the struggles I go through as someone who's both kind of in the Air Force and not really in the Air Force at all.

I mean, let's start with that name. Civilian airman? What does that even mean? Call me a civil servant, a GS, a pencil pusher, a bureaucrat, a fed, federal employee, I don't really care. But airman? Why would I be an airman too? What have I done to deserve that title? I didn't sign a contract giving up some of the best years of my life, I didn't go to boot camp, I don't wear a uniform. I don't have to do physical fitness tests every year, I don't have to worry about being sent into danger and never returning with minimal warning, I get all weekends and holidays off, and I don't even have to wake up early if I don't want to.

You all are the real airmen. You took an oath, perhaps basically the same oath as I did, but with you, it actually means something. You have an automatic camaraderie with others in uniform (in the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and even now Starfleet) which I'll never fully experience so long as I wear my 3 for $50 Joseph A. Bank dress shirts. You all also get thanked for your service everywhere you go, and get handed USAA, discounts, and free flight upgrades; deservedly so.

On the rare occasions now that I have to go on base, SecFo sometimes calls me sir at the gate - again, why? I'm not an officer, hell, I'm not even enlisted. I'm just a person who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do, so they took a low-pressure, safe, predictable government desk job. I don't personally save lives at my (remote) desk, I don't get to fly cool planes or even big ones, I don't get to carry a gun, I just hit keys all day.

When you all have to work with incompetent or abusive people on the uniformed side, usually there are safeguards in place which eventually weed people out or at least get them remediation. On the civilian side, if someone gets through their probationary period, they might as well be a tenured professor at ITT Tech. We just get stuck with people who hold the same position for years and yet somehow never actually learn how to do their job.

Take some of the people I work with. I'm an 1102, so I spend a lot of time dealing with PM and FM people. In my time with the Air Force, I've worked with a couple of PMs/FMs who really knew their stuff. But by and large, I feel like I not only could do, but do do, their jobs better than them. There's an FM guy who sends me funding documents, and he can never seem to get them right. On any given day I should be handed millions of dollars in critical funding to support Air Force missions, but nine days out of ten, there's an issue and I have to tell him how to do his job. Last week, I was supposed to get one document with $10M on it. Instead, I got three with the following exact amounts: $1.70, $1.40, and $0.40. How did he even manage that? Where did the other $9,999,996.50 even go?!

And it's not like there's any help from people higher up the chain - they just pass responsibility onto someone else ad nauseam. I've told my PCO about how awful this guy is at his job, and she told me to talk to her boss. He, in turn, promised to schedule me a 0400 Zoom call with the first SES in our org structure.

When I got on the call, the SES's screen was black and I just heard heavy breathing. After I nervously introduced myself, they apologized and said to give them a second - their assistant under secretary for technological competence was still setting things up. After an eternity, the camera finally turned on. As we started talking, something didn't feel right, but all I saw was a single eye. I worked up the nerve to ask the SES to reposition their camera, even if I'm only a GS-01. They did so, but with a giant attitude.

As they came into focus, it became clear that they were, in fact, Nessie the Loch Ness Monster, and I immediately traced the IP back to the Scottish Highlands. At that point, I yelled, "I'm not procuring you any contractor souls to sacrifice, even if the lowest bidder came in at about tree fiddy!"

Then I slammed my computer shut and spent the rest of my shift playing Warzone with the boys.