And so, PFC Alvarez gets his final lesson. At some point, he might get promoted to E-4, but until then, he just has to try to walk the path of wisdom he has been given and try not to stumble.

As mentioned before, a good E-4 has been in the military long enough to know how to “read the room.” If an E-4 (be it a Specialist, a Lance Corporal, Senior Airman, etc) walks into a room and sees an unattended mop bucket, they know that sooner or later some NCO is coming to assign a task… so they find a way to be somewhere else or look appropriately busy. You just pick up the vibe of the room and the people in it and you know.

That is the miracle of “the E-4 Cloaking Device”.

And the truth is, once you’ve learned to master it, it never truly goes away. Sometimes, even as an NCO with years of service, I can still disappear from time to time, just for briefer periods of time before someone legitimately needs me for something (usually to affirm a decision that was, in truth, painfully obvious from the start).

Does that mean that junior officers, who went through ROTC, never developed the E-4 spider sense and cloaking device? It is true; they did not. Young eager Second Lieutenants have an alternate power: they are so happy to share their Good Ideas that people simply avoid them, and it becomes a sort of reverse-Uno cloaking device instead.