Not presently, but I recently got a new job and it looks like the best course of action is another go at force-morning-person-ness. This will probably work out for the best in many respects. This is all tied to meetings (ones where people are nominally polite to all participants, which has been a culture shock) which put me in mind of one of the twists the Army threw into my life in its attempt to make me a morning person.
See, in every ADA (Air Defense Artillery) battery I was in, officers went to PT with their troops at 0630. That was enough morning for me, thanks, but on several occasions, the battery commanders got it into their heads to have a meeting at 0530…then another one at the end of the day, with the same people, about the same general things, anywhere from 1600 to- for one truly miserable summer- 1930. For anyone who don’t know how to convert from military time, subtract 12 from anytime after 1200, there’s your civilian time.
You may think a lot can change on a weekday night between 1730 (merciful days, those) and 0530. It’s twelve whole hours! In an Army unit! That’s like half a day! A lot can change in half a day!
That’s half a day that occurs at night when you aren’t deployed and the morning is early for everyone. When these dual meetings were their most miserable, our largest concern was making sure people got to their appointments. Not much happens on weekday nights when you aren’t deployed. The evening meeting was exactly the same as the next morning’s meeting.
N.B.: Deployed, things do change in those hours for an ADA unit. Mostly things break. Sometimes it is even actually something important.
I am convinced that many Army commanders would greatly prefer it if their soldiers worked like modern Roombas. You program them to function during certain hours, they do the thing you want, then they head back to their charging docks and go inert until they are supposed to do something again. Alas, the Army is composed of people. People are chaotic and willful. Anything could happen.
This fact eats at the mind of many a commander to the point it induces a slowly grinding paranoia, hence a morning meeting that contains exactly the same information as the meeting the evening before. Something could happen overnight and…I guess the commander might get a phone call about it and maybe call subordinates with directions about what to do about said something and that would just be…not an hour-long meeting at the crack of dawn.
Largely, nothing happens overnight. Soldiers go home, amuse themselves in innocuous ways, and go to bed. Nothing organizationally exciting happens.
But it might, I suppose. Might makes tyrants out of men.
