There is an ancient Greek tale of the legend of Sisyphus, who was committed various sins on Earth and so the Gods punished him. He had to roll a boulder up a hill, only just as he got near the top, the boulder would slip from his grasp and roll downhill, forcing him to start over.

Sounds frustrating, but at the same time, a lot of humor is borne out of frustration, so here we are.

This represents a typical training day in my National Guard unit. Us “weekenders” get a limited amount of time to train, but we’re expected to meet all the same training goals as regular, Active-Duty troops in the course of a year.

I understand we have to do this, but training gets spread out so that it seems to constantly be interrupting our workflow. We’ve tried to encourage setting aside two or three days out of Annual Training for all these classes, but to little avail. Stuff keeps percolating up in “here and there” training events so we can never truly build up momentum in our actual duties.

Fortunately, my real-life OIC is pretty understanding, but people detached from the situation can sometimes have a shoulder-shrugging response and a “well, it needs to be done” approach that is equally frustrating.

There have been a couple times we just flat-out said, “no, this needs to get done and can’t be kicked down the road”. We really did have some tight deadlines, and if we didn’t do our jobs, everyone deploying to Kosovo was going to be stuck on the ground come the day to leave.

We don’t often have hard backstops like that, but sometimes a serious workload with a tight deadline is actually a blessing in disguise.