At least she was honest...

...about saying she didn't know.

In the FD there is a strict refusal to adhere to a quality called the Peter Principle which says that people will rise to their highest level of incompetence and no more. In the FD this is frequently seen as a direct affront to one's self-worth and they will exceed this maxim and with full disclosure by the people that put them in those positions, rise far BEYOND their level of incompetence.

Here is a transcript of the letter I sent to my other station captains about some records I have been trying, for 6 months, to get archived.

"Dearest Other Captains,

You will note the bathroom door does not remain wedged open. I went through the records and put the Captain’s Logs by decade. Other than that there is no discernable order, I am afraid. I have piled them out in the bay because they WILL be going away soon.

I called Chief Riley again and told him our dilemma again and how I was looking forward to recycling all this paper no one wanted. He made some calls and shook trees and a nice lady called me from Quartermaster. She is nominally in charge of archiving station records. She freely admits she doesn’t know what she is doing and we would limp through this together. I sympathized. She and I made several researching calls and I was told this…

She asked how many boxes we needed and I said just three at this moment (if someone wants to send their ffers up to above the watch office to retrieve the other records I will sort through them). She was quiet for a minute and said, “But we only send out 25 boxes at a time.” I replied, calmly I thought, that we had two and a half decades of records and it barely filled 3 boxes. I asked her why don’t you put our piddly three boxes with the others that must surely be waiting to go to Iron Mountain so as to make 25. She said she would call me back. When she called back she said that would be impossible because there was no room at Dart to store records waiting to be shipped off (Arson must be hogging up the place.) I said for us to accumulate 25 boxes of records would take 22 more years and I would be close to retirement by then. She acknowledged that that did seem to be a problem. Then she whispered into the phone that she was certain that Logs were probably not being maintained in proper archival security anyways. Of that I have absolutely no doubt. I asked her if she was aware if ANY station records had EVER been sent for archiving and she said she didn’t know. None that she could remember.

So the upshot is she is sending me three boxes and labels. I am going to continue to badger her to take the three boxes and because now it has become less of a mission of caring for continuity of records-keeping and more a mission to see how ridiculous this can get. Lol

FYI – Captains logs are kept in perpetui in this alleged Archiving place. One year’s of Captain’s Logs are to be kept at the station. Watch Office logs go away after a year. I am not even going to tell you how THAT disastrous process works. I had to write it down and look at it and came to the conclusion that civilizations were rendered obsolete with less evil planning than goes into getting approval to destroy a 1984 Watch Office Log.  

KP"