Veterans' personal phone calls

The phone calls I overhear at work are sometimes hilariously awkward. It's a joint-level military headquarters, so it's a mix of senior military, Department of Defense civilians, and ex-military contractors. And when you get old people, you get old people issues.

For example, of the seven guys who work in my section, there's one who's battling cancer, two who qualify for disabled parking spaces, another who is 90% disabled, and me with MS.

Unsurprisingly, broken old people have a lot of medical appointments to make. This wouldn't normally be an issue if we had cubicles or private spaces to make phone calls, but this is where the military makes things difficult.

First off, we have no cubicles -- just a line of desks so that our boss can look over our shoulders at any time. Neither are there any separators between our monitors. So there's absolutely no such thing as a private conversation.

Second, we're not allowed to bring cell phones into the building. The building is considered "open storage," meaning that it's OK to leave classified materials sitting on your desk, rather than being stored in a filing cabinet at the end of the day.

This is convenient, but it also means tight controls on cell phones and flash media. So it's not like you can just step into the hallway to make a phone call.

Third, the building only has enough cell phone "lockers" for visitors, so you can't even store your cell phone securely outside the building. This was deliberate. As we have been directed, we are to leave our phones in our cars. if we have to make a phone call, we have to go out to your car.

As if that's not enough, the final layer of difficulty is that if you want to go out to your car, and you arrived for work after 7:00, you have to go ALL THE WAY UP THE HILL.

Suffice to say, it's just waaaay easier to make your medical appointments over the phone, and that's what the guy with cancer has been doing.

I feel bad for him. It's bad enough to have a serious medical condition. It another to be locked up during the day with coworkers who can hear your every conversation.