Month 11 Day 3

Notebook entry

15 reports given, Eriksen 10,000 hours, Herbert Simon, Bill Chase, most significant activity, filling in Canal, Qais returns 15:30 civilian clothes, Manning situation, ‘wazi fait ma naist’ (it's not my job).

Journal entry

I am listening to The Talent Code by Dan Coyle.  He brings up the same stat that Malcolm Gladwell brought up about 10,000 hours of practice.  Apparently the stats were started by a psychologist named Ericson, Herbert Simon and Bill Chase.  The whole point in his book is that Myolin coats your Axons and makes you better at certain skills.  What I wonder is if it is ever legitimately possible to change the ANA.  They have spent plenty of time hard-wiring in survival, but not a lot of time hard-wiring in work-to-success.  If this basically adds up to 10 years of consistent work, do we actually have enough interaction and time to work with these guys to change their perspectives/lives?

I went to the Lines of Operation Sync meeting in the morning.  It was not bad, the OpsO wasn’t there and the CO was, he stated his desires, intent, and no one got off track, that’s really nice.  There was a bit of discussion about what the Maj Tawoos had told me about the other day.  The Provincial Gov had decided that because a bunch of people were squatters, that he was going to cut off their water by filling in the canal that led to their farms.  This was dubbed ‘an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem.’

The Maj was still gone, so I spent a lot of my time working on the LinkedIn stuff in the afternoon. 

Qais came back in the late afternoon he was real happy to be back, and said that he had a good time I leave, but he was not in a mood to work and stunk to high heaven, so I told him I’d work with him tomorrow. 

The manning situation is pretty bad right now only the S-1 is reporting for duty. 

Capt Brawny learned the phrase ‘wasi-fait-ma-n’est’  It’s not my job when talking to the code/encryption officer.  He seems to think that Encrypting the radios is not his job.