bean counting

Just came back from a long bullshit session with a fellow lieutenant and my commander after work. It started out pleasantly enough, but by the end I was drained, and sorry I had stayed after work to enjoy the boots-on-the-table camaraderie. The subject of debate, which started with politics and moved to the deficiencies of the public school system, turned into both of them trying to convince me that math, as the "universal language," is the most important subject of all. If civilization ended tomorrow, they postulated, we could do without Shakespeare, but the Pythagorean Theorem would be indispensable. I responded that since mathematical concepts are usually predicated upon the use of characters whose meanings are derived from language, I considered both language and math to be equally important. Guffaws ensued, as apparently nothing could be allowed to share the stage with math. This particularly pissed me off, because from what I gather of our conversations about undergraduate study, I was the most balanced student of the three of us, consistently applying myself, excelling in and appreciating all of my classes--in high school, I can honestly say that trigonometry and statistics were a joy, even if they came a little less easily than English and Spanish, the subjects I later majored in in college. I suggested that they try to communicate one single mathematical concept, such as addition, without using speech. Neither even attempted to do it, but somehow I walked away as the one "without a clue." My husband, normally a bastion of literary and l'arte pour l'arte soapboxes, is off getting in touch with his bean-counting* side during Army Reserve training this weekend, and I couldn't find any like minds online. I just had to sigh and immerse myself in internet surfing. Ughh. I don't belong here! (By which I mean, I don't belong here longterm, of course...)

*"Bean-counting" is a phrase (I don't remember if I ever heard it outside the Army) that refers to painstaking accountability of people, equipment, training, and other resources. I would say that 90% of what I do all day, every day, is associated with some slide where we have to brief exactly (which is an art and science) what we have, how much we still need to meet the standard (by regulation or a higher headquarters' articulated standard), and exactly how we are going to make up the difference. For example, the silliest thing happened one month, when a tiny, antiquated piece of equipment almost became the subject of hot debate. It had been identified as missing several months prior, and was probably being phased out, as the Army decided to take our authorizations for it from a large number (say, 50) down to 0 very suddenly. Yet the equipment was still listed as required for our mission. Unless you read our MTOE (Modified Table of Organization and Equipment) very carefully, you would wonder why the numbers were suddenly showing us as less ready than we were the previous month to go to war. We had to scrub that thing inside and out before we figured it out. The issue ended up being that this tiny piece of equipment, which we had suspected for months as missing, had finally been updated in our property book to show the shortage. My commander and I scratched our heads, trying to figure out how to brief this, neither wanting to draw attention to the missing piece of equipment, which had already been paid for out of pocket, as per regulation. In the end, we decided (and this is the artful piece) not to even bring up the change, which was staring our commander in the face on the slide, unless asked. It worked--he was so preoccupied that he didn't even notice, which gives us time to try and order a replacement and work through other channels to get our readiness rating back to perfect. That, in sum, is bean-counting. I have to believe that it is a valuable skill, and I don't underestimate the human component to it: logistics are everywhere, and the ability to manage resources is something I've come to appreciate because of my worldview. I see people as stewards or managers of the world, responsible for its care, and when it comes to securing resources for my family, classroom, or school district, I think it will probably come in handy. It does force you to appreciate and dignify people around you whose work touches logistics --from the bus driver, to the chief custodian, to the maintenance guy... it is a beautifully complex world we live in. My only frustration with last night's dialogue at work was that I bend over backwards to access my mathematical, right-brain, and masculine sides every day at work. I just wish sometimes it were more reciprocated by my colleagues who seem at times to live in those hemispheres almost exclusively.