PCS

I'm guessing (hoping) that some of you might have noticed my lack of recent blog activity. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is that since very shortly after my my wife got home, we've been in a state of military life known as "PCS."

For most people, "PCS" is the acronym that Sprint uses when it describes its cell phone network. For those in the military, it means something different: Permanent Change of Station. PCS combines all of the wonderful fun of moving with the joy that comes from repeated adventures into the Kafkaesque military bureaucracy. At the best of times, a PCS move is stressful. Unfortunately, this is not the best of times for the military.

Officially, people who are going to PCS upon their return from a combat zone deployment are supposed to be home about 90 days before the move. That's just about enough time to get everything lined up for a smooth transition - arrange to end all of the services at the old residence, find a new residence at the new base, arrange for the movers for the household goods, the shipment of the car (or, as the military likes to refer to it, the POV), unaccompanied baggage pickup, temporary furniture and/or lodging, transportation of family and pets to the new duty station, and "outprocessing" from the old duty station - without going absolutely insane and while still having time to do all of the redeployment processing that happens at the end of the combat deployment. Currently, those who get 45 days (as my wife did) to take care of everything are considered to be lucky. Most are getting 30 days, and less than that is not unheard of.

By the way, one of the more fun things about this process is that you know it's coming, but there's only so much that you can do to prepare. You can start to clean and organize the house to get ready for the movers, and you can look for places to live online, but that's about it unless you are willing to incur significant out-of-pocket expenses. That's because most of the things that are involved can't be done until you have written orders for the PCS. We got those on May 1st - the week after my wife got back - for a move that we'll be making on June 11th.

Since then, my wife's spent a fair bit of time going through the redeployment bureaucracy - mostly medical screenings, but a few other kinds of screening, too - and as much of the outprocessing bureaucracy as she can - not much, because they don't let you do a lot of it until you're closer to your departure date. At the same time, the two of us got to go through the PCS bureaucracy. Mostly, this consists of standing on the right lines in the right sequence.

The military has not mastered, as of yet, the concept of one-stop service.

That means that we've had to make appointments at several different places, and then re-make some of those appointments when we found that they required paperwork from some of the appointments that we hadn't been to yet. If you're curious, we found, through trial and error, that the correct sequence of steps is to (a) get the orders, (b) wait on line to schedule an appointment at transportation services, (c) go to the appointment at transportation services, (d) get on the line to get plane tickets and get the tickets, (e) confirm the pack and pickup dates with the mover, and (f) give notice to post housing. The sequence of steps that we actually went through before learning that the correct sequence is a,b,c,d,e,f was something along the lines of f,b,a,b,d,c,f,d,f,e,f.

I'm hoping to post a little more regularly over the next few weeks, and will definitely be able to do so once we finish the move, but if I disappear at strange intervals between now and 12 June, it probably has something to do with this whole PCS process.