Beyond the Clipboard Trick

When it's business its good to be professional 😌

I hope that General did not play poker.

I would have loved to work for/with you. Too bad our careers never crossed.

Whew! I am so, so glad I will never be in another staff meeting! 😊

I was on staff for a three-star; the only way to get people to move on my issue was to go to their desk and ask for an update. People will ignore emails and won't answer the phone, but they can't ignore you standing there looking at them.
Works every time.

Ah, the psychology of meetings! I'm free from that now, but listening to this I'm visualizing folks that I once worked with. Myself? I'm a doodler who occasionally writes down bullet points (my own, not what is on the slide normally).

As for the clipboard.... I worked in a BDE 3 shop for a couple of years. I had worked 8 straight days with little sleep and the SGM told me to go F off for a few hours (his way of providing me a respite). I grabbed a clipboard and pad of paper and walked around our small installation all day. There were several stops at the snack bar involved. I just put down little tick marks and slashes on the paper periodically. I was stopped ONCE by an SFC who asked what I was doing. I told him that a certain LT (well known for his level of stupid) had me walking around counting trees. He grunted, mumbled something about officers and walked away. Spent the whole day slacking - but I actually did count the trees out of boredom lol.

The clipboard idea works so well that a couple of American POWs escaped a German POW camp in WW2 using a variation. They somehow got civilian clothing and one of them had a tape measure while the other had the clip lard and a pencil. One of them would pretend to be measuring things: lamp posts, sidewalk width, whatever, and the other would write down the measurements. They walked out the front gate of the camp and across Germany doing this.

And the legend of the thief who stole an Air Force fire truck from Clark AFB. Supposedly he simply got in it, turned on the lights and sirens and drove it through the front gate while the guards, seeing and hearing the lights and sirens, held traffic for him.

During Exercise ULCHI FOCUS LENS in Korea I infiltrated the Seoul HQ secure basement area without a badge or security clearance as an LT by carrying a plate of cookies. “It’s for the big general officer meeting” was all I needed to say. (Though it was the truth) One harassed and overworked LTC S2 cubicle monkeys recognized what I was doing. But his own co-workers pressured him to shut up. Nobody cock blocks GO cookies.

One of my peers had a Jedi mind trick to convince a peer or subordinate to do or agree on something. He’d get somewhat close, make eye contact and lay out is reasoning emphatically and vigorously nodding his head up and down. He had a Jimmy Stewart type earnestness that caused the weak willed to nod their head up and down in response. Once they did they were done.

Classic 😂

I sometimes do both the coffee and I have an OCP Portfolio with my name tape on it that has one of those stack of line white paper that have a cardboard spine in it with a pen in the pen hold. I have that so it can be folded under my arm and have a thermos that has the "Army Reserve" logo and Star that's always full of Coffee. As an AGR SGT(P) working in the S3 office I just want to do my work, then skip off to the gym and back without anyone up the food chain thinking I'm unproductive. When I was a Team Leader brand new CPL I learned this trick and maintained it my whole career since. Perception is everything in the military and I like to look busy.

The combination of the classic clipboard plus a tape measure can terrify people. ;)