Holy MotherOfGod

That and, "Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" were my mother's go-to comments when my brother and I misbehaved very badly. Which wasn't very often. Not when she was in visual or auditory range, anyway. She was a fallen Catholic, after all. She left the Church when Pope Paul VI opted to squash all hope of the Church getting on board the contraception bandwagon created by Pope John XXIII's promising direction in the Second Vatican Council by issuing, "ON THE REGULATION OF BIRTH, Humanae Vitae, ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI."

An alternative headline for that encyclical could be, "Pope Paul VI Poo-Poos the Pill." See how easy that was? But nooooo. The OneAndOnlyHolyRomanApostolicCatholicChurch 

is the mother of all bureaucracies. It didn't invent acronyms but I'm quite sure that that it gave rise to the need. 

In fact, I posit that government created acronyms and a dizzying array at that. Logically, that means that government is the daughter of all bureaucracies. The Internet, IMHO (LOL) is its niece in that respect.

And all this has what to do with job hunting? From the Internet, we got the magic of Facebook, reconnecting us to so many friends of times long ago. One in particular, with whom I served as a Cold Warrior in the late 70s, has encouraged me to pursue seeking a job in federal service so that I could acquire the requisite service years to receive a pension. I resigned my Air Force commission after nine years.

No, I wasn't a pilot. I was a Public Affairs Officer (PAO), a DINFOS Trained Killer, here pictured in a borrowed flight suit sitting on the steps of a hangar queen B-52 on the Boeing Wichita tarmac. I served mostly at intercontinental ballistic missile bases. One particularly zany numbered air force commander decided that all of his PAOs needed to experience going on a B-52 low-level bombing training mission. I squealed, I begged, I said I'd do multiple tours in an underground launch control center in god-knows-where Kansas, but to no avail. I had to go to Enid, Okla., of all the god forsaken places, for a flight orientation course featuring being shot up a rail in an ejection seat trainer (even though my means of emergency egress was to follow the navigator through a hole in the belly of the plane), and experience both hypoxia and sudden decompression in an altitude chamber. 

Fun times. But not as much as the pre-dawn takeoff in an actual B-52 to fly at 500 miles-per-hour, 500 feet off the ground, over the hot expanse of Texas with the big old wings catching every updraft. I can't remember if I threw up or just wanted desperately to do so. Per the general's direction, I wrote a piece for our base newspaper.

Today, my Facebook friend sent me a link to a job in the San Francisco office of the USDA, listed in USAJOBS.gov. I loved being a PAO and this job looked fun, even if across a bridge, so I decided to apply.

That's where the Holy MotherOfGod part comes in. Just creating an account was an hour-long nightmare of successfully entering the same convoluted password twice and failing to find all of the hidden required fields. It wanted dates of my Air Force service but would only show a calendar that had all the months of 2014.

Still practicing, "Excellence in all we do," one of the three core values of being an Air Force officers ("Integrity First," and "Service Before Self" being the others), I persevered and achieve mastery over the over-designed headache of both USAJOBS.gov and the agency's application page. 

You have to really want it to apply for federal work online. I suppose, given the unmitigated fiasco of signing up for Obamacare, I shouldn't have been surprised.