I have just spent the last two and one-half hours – the work is not yet complete – navigating the administrative wickets necessary to go on travel to a foreign country.
Step 0: Recieve guidance from AT Officer that Navy Knowledge Online training is required for Level 1 AT accomplishment. Step 1: Go to Navy Knowledge Online (NKO) for the first time in nine months to take the Level 1 Anti-Terrorism course. Step 2: Drum fingers on desk for several minutes trying to remember NKO login and password. Step 3: Hope that subject data has been filed in the appropriately encrypted memo page on PDA. Step 4: Realize that while “hope is not a strategy” it nevertheless works. Sometimes. Step 5: Take course. Sample questions:
“You are driving from the airport to your hotel and realize that you are being followed. Do you, A) Stop at the light, step out of your car and ask the person following if there’s a good restaurant in the area that serves halal falafel? B) Step out of your car at the light and demand to see some ID – after all, you are in the Navy! C) Accelerate through the light, travel to dimly lit side streets in the most dismal part of town, ditch your vehicle on a curb and try to hide in an abandoned warehouse? or, C) None of the above
Answer: Incorrect! You chose ‘C – None of the above.’ The correct answer was ‘D, – None of the above.’ “
Step 6: Complete course, hit “Submit.” Wait for 10 minutes as final screen fails to load. Sigh aloud. Hit “Control-alt-delete,” End Process.
Step 7: Read accompanying instructions entitled “Read before taking course!” and including such obvious steps as turning Javascript off in the “Advanced” options tab, but enabling it under Microsoft VM. Delete cookies. Step 8: Comply with pre-course requirements. Re-boot computer. It’s an NCMI machine, so, yeah: Do lunch. You’ve got time. Step 9: Re-take test – “You have passed!” (Yaayy!) Step 10: Search vainly for course completion certificate required as proof that you took the AT course. Your word, of course, being useless. Step 11: Telephone AT Officer, learn that the NKO site doesn’t issue a certificate, but that you can get one by doing the Joint Forces Command Level 1 AT training. On line. Step 12: Add AT Officer’s name to “People to Kill” list. Step 13: Take JFC Level 1 AT Course. Step 14: Observe that, “My these questions look familiar.”
Step 15: Having completed the JFC Level 1 AT course, navigate through the minefield of creating a COMPACFLEET “Individual Force Protection Plan.” Step16-19: At various steps along the way, when the screen freezes, hit “Refresh” in the hope that you won’t be sent back to the login screen. Step 20: Realize that hope will only get you so far in this world, son. Step 21: Complete survey form, admit that you are probably more trained in AT techniquest than you had been when you woke up this morning. Search – once more in vain – for any text box to tell the webmaster what you really think of his online course. But they are clever people, those webmasters.
Step 21: Relax, you’re done! Having successfully burned nearly three hours – this post was started during steps 16-19 – you are now ready for your trip to Vancouver, Canada.
This was the future I had hoped for!
I love Vancouver! Hope you have a good time.
Wow! That was a lot of work just to go next door. Perhaps you should consider the East Coast sometime – we might just get friendlier down this way
Sorry………that was suppose to read “we might just be friendlier down here”.
Vancouver Canada? I thought this was the test for you San Diego Navy guys to come to D.C. on May 4th….
Sir,
I hope you realize this was all OPSEC – you’ve given our enemies invaluable information on paralyzing the US Navy (invite them all to Canada).
Please report to your security officer.
NKO and e-learning are our friends. They mean well. And you can’t be too careful with those extremist Canadians, eh.
(though not you, Michelle)
1. I’d like to revisit Michelle’s offer to “Get friendlier.” No wonder Pinch married himself a Canadian.
2. Lex, if you happend to be a member of the Naval Reserve (I know, perish the thought!) you would now have the pleasure of writing your own travel orders via the NROWS system. NROWS was designed to “streamline” the TAD order writing process by putting it in the hands of the traveller and his command. It is a 457 step process in which your orders can be held up, changed, or randomly cancelled on any step that ends in an even number or 3,5, or 7.
I believe the code for NROWS was written in 2002 utilizing either FORTRAN or BASIC, so not only do I get the joy of doing the YNs and PSDs work for them (not sure what it is they really do anymore) I get to plan the murder of several computer geeks as I step through the process.
Nose
You are driving from the airport to your hotel and realize that you are being followed. Do you, A) Stop at the light, step out of your car and ask the person following if there?
You are driving from the airport to your hotel and realize that you are being followed. Do you, A) Stop at the light, step out of your car and ask the person following if there’s a good restaurant in the area that serves halal falafel? B) Step out of your car at the light and demand to see some ID – after all, you are in the Navy! C) Accelerate through the light, travel to dimly lit side streets in the most dismal part of town, ditch your vehicle on a curb and try to hide in an abandoned warehouse? or, C) None of the above
E) Shoot everyone to hell and back and sort it out later.
Lex, bud, I have news for ya – training in the corporate world is just as bad. I just completed my “overseas training” and it was almost step for step (save the NMCI bit) what I went through…
- SJS
I took that same course just be allowed to work on the base. Although I don’t remember those questions being quite that obvious.
Pretty close, though… LOL!
I was lucky enough to skate through it, but the next person who did it online had it lock up and had to restart. I only had the joy of trying to make the thing print my certificate.
“you are now ready for your trip to Vancouver, Canada.”
Is this ordeal required for some official Navy business, or just a “me and the mrs. going for a sunday drive”?
If it’s any consolation, I’ve recently “been there, done that, got the T-shirt” with the Army Knowledge Online Defensive Driving course. Probably one of those standardization programs…
I always kept flunking that AT test. They always asked questions like, “You have a choice of going back to the hotel or going out in town looking for the good bars. What should you do?”
I’d always choose option two. Took me five hours to get that stupid thing over with.
The really good one is the one about learning to notice signs of human traffiking and sex slavery.
“You step into the back alleyway and find a group of men standing around a woman. They appear to be raping her, do you: a) intervene on her behalf verbally b) Step back inside the bar and address it with the bartender c) Pull the men off her forcibly d) Return to you nearest base or duty station and report the incident without intervening or starting a fight?”
I got that one wrong about 3 times.
Nose, you might recall that Pinch’s bride is an East Coaster too……..what can I say? Probably enough already LOL
jpr, Canadians…….I hear they’re all lefties. Need I say more?
Lex, why do I have the sense you had less to go through to go to Bahrain as opposed to Vancouver? Well you will be happy to know that we do allow uncovered skin here. Although you might want to be a tad bit careful with that, exposed skin will start to freeze at around -20 degrees or so.
Oh yeah, thats Celsius, not Fahrenheit.
Sir,
That was hilarious. Funny because it’s true. And Steeljaw Scribe is right. We have that on the outside, too. (At least at our major government-contracted research lab managed by a company whose senior management had ethical problems about ten years ago so we all must take computer-based ethics training once per year.)
Ens Tim,I would do answer “C”, no matter what the “Correct” answer is.
I suspect you and the rest of this community would do likewise.
“Step 7: Read accompanying instructions entitled ?
“Step 7: Read accompanying instructions entitled “Read before taking course!” and including such obvious steps as turning Javascript off in the “Advanced” options tab, but enabling it under Microsoft VM. Delete cookies. Step 8: Comply with pre-course requirements. Re-boot computer.”
Good lord. It sounds like my employers wrote that software. Guh – bad software is…bad. So sorry you had to suffer for lousy programming.
Remember when we all thought computers would make our lives better? I’ve learned that they do process an increased amount of paper-work for us, creating an ever-increasing amount of paper!
Glad to hear you’re trekking to our beautiful Pacific Northwest… you’ll be just north of us here, in the Emerald City. (By the way, when you’re in Vancouver, don’t leave anything in plain sight in your car! An advisory from your area insurance professional.)
You need that course for an IA, too!
b2
Peter? Canadian?? No?
I was waiting for you to learn that you had to either pick up the certificate at an office that was only open on the Tuesday after the First Monday from 0800-0805 or
that it would be six – eight weeks until the certificate would arrive vis US Mail
jpr said:
“And you can?
jpr said:
“And you can’t be too careful with those extremist Canadians, eh. (though not you, Michelle)”
Sheesh, talk about a place where everybody knows your name…….and your nationality…….your profession…….your politics…… (and they still let you in the door!)
I knew there was a reason I liked this place! Pass me a beer, will ya Norm?
Michelle, In my view its partly because your a Nova Scotian and NOT… I repeat NOT a typically reflexive anti-American from Ontario or Quebec. Best
Gee, Snake, are Ontarions and the Quebecois really that bad? Yeah, you’re right, they can be…….Upper Canadians…. patooey! Not our sort at all …. Although I’m actually from Western Canada, the Prairies, I’m proud to say that I’ve now lived more of my life on the East Coast than anywhere else.
BTW, what’s the other part? My wonderfully compelling personality? The mind capable of lightening-fast, razor-sharp analysis? Brilliant, cutting wit? Grasp of the subtle nuances? Oh sorry, I must have confused myself with someone else….
Michelle, how about, Your sweet disposition!
LOL
Unkawill, somehow I just knew that somewhere following in this thread I was gonna see the word “sweet” show up. Not really sure what to make of that, surrounded as I am by a group of high-flying low-drag aviators and their friends. Except that underneath those tough, sometimes snarky exteriors (you know who you are!), hide an awful lot of charming and winsome people. (present comapny included, of course).
I thought that somehow you’d wrongly been directed to one of the online tests at my company, until you got to the “…after all, you are in the Navy!” part.
Do they have a special school for test question writers?
Sorry, I don’t know what you wrote, there. I got really bad MEGO at about 2.3 sentences into it. As near as I can bear to think about, you were talking about combined civil and naval bureaucratic craziness? With two different nation-states involved?
Yikes!
If the NKO is like the AKO (Army knowledge online) then those modules can be quickly defeated by clicking away! Rapid and often, like covering fire.
Sometimes it’s the enter key, use both liberally. Then if you manage to hang the system up call IT and they will put you down as having completed the class.