Skip to content

Tag: WTF

Aiming High in the Air Force: 2006, Part One: Moving Up and Out

Aiming High in the Air Force: 2006, Part One: Moving Up and Out

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on November 4, 2011

As 2006 opened, my friends brought me along to a New Year’s party on the Strip, to help get my mind off everything that had happened over the past year.

New Year’s on the Strip

The weekend, of course, brought new challenges to the brand new year. My dorm room shared a bathroom with the room next door, and my neighbor and I hosted a small party in my room. He, unfortunately, had too much to drink. When he insisted on trying to drive one of the girls back to her dorm, two blocks away, she and I both told him that he wouldn’t be driving anywhere that night, and took his keys away to make sure of it. His thinking process was clearly impaired, because his response was to dive headfirst off the second floor balcony at the end of the hallway where our dorm rooms were located.

Continue readingAiming High in the Air Force: 2006, Part One: Moving Up and Out
Aiming High in the Air Force: 2005, Part Two: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Aiming High in the Air Force: 2005, Part Two: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on October 30, 2011

In August, not long after I’d returned from summer camp with the Boy Scouts, the annual Las Vegas Star Trek Convention came around again. This would be my third year attending the convention, and this year, I would enter the costume contest.

Me at the convention with Menina Fortunato, who played an Orion Slave Girl in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Bound”

Wearing a custom-made and fitted uniform from the movie era of the original Star Trek–specifically, the 2280s and ’90s, as seen in the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan through the first act of Star Trek: Generations–I made my way to the Las Vegas Hilton. The contest wasn’t until later in the day, so I wandered the convention area. I’d tried to make the costume as accurate as possible. Heads turned everywhere I went. People wanted to get their photo taken with me. Some people even thought I worked at Star Trek: The Experience.

Continue readingAiming High in the Air Force: 2005, Part Two: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
Aiming High in the Air Force: 2005, Part One: I’d Like a Mulligan

Aiming High in the Air Force: 2005, Part One: I’d Like a Mulligan

Published by Jeffrey Harlan on October 26, 2011

The events of the last two months clearly illustrated to me that my supervisor and superintendent were, most assuredly, not on my side. In fact, they were actively trying to find an excuse–any excuse–to build a case to force me out of the military.

Airman Harlan, 2005

I couldn’t figure out why. The most plausible explanation, according to another senior sergeant that I worked with, seemed to be that they felt threatened by how much more I knew about our job than they did: my supervisor wasn’t even from our career field and had never been trained for our primary job, and my superintendent had been in a headquarters position for several years, and the job had changed significantly in that time. Whether this was true or not, I’ll probably never know.

Continue readingAiming High in the Air Force: 2005, Part One: I’d Like a Mulligan
Aiming High in the Air Force: 2004, Part Two: Crash and Burn
“Chinese curse” interesting bus ridesOCTA Bus (from Wikipedia)