Rhianna's recent post reminded me of one of my own experiences with incompetent support people in the military.

The setup of the situation is that I went for about a month and a half collecting an allowance (simply, money for a specific reason) from the Navy that I wasn't eligible for. I was eligible before the month and a half, I was eligible after the month and a half, but not during that period. It was a tad more complicated than that, but not by much.

Just so I could know how much I would end up having to pay back once all the paperwork got caught up, I went into Disbursing to ask one of the Disbursing Clerks (a pay clerk, in non-Naval parlance) for a rough estimate of how much I was overpaid.

Rather than just using authoritative pay tables which indicate how much the allowance was per day, the clerk went into a full-scale audit of my pay record. Part of the reason he got sidetracked was the fact that I was promoted four days after the end of this month and a half period in question. But I wasn't worried about that — I just wanted him to take the pay table that shows the daily allowance amount and multiply it by (roughly) 45. But no, rather than take five (or maybe fifteen) minutes to get out the charts and punch a few numbers into a calculator, he has to go into a big audit. Which, you can probably guess by now, he screwed up completely.

After an hour and a half, he comes back to me with the news that I had been, in fact, underpaid. I told him that was impossible, because I had been paid the correct amounts both before and after the period in question, and I was overpaid in that intervening month and a half. After a few minutes of futile argument, I left in disgust.

Six months later, I got my pay docked for the period I was overpaid. And all I wanted was an idea of how much that dockage was going to be.

Few people are more annoying than the willfully incompetent.