It's only day one, but man am I glad I switched career fields! I haven't been this excited and motivated about work since I first got commissioned. Today was mostly in-processing stuff, entailing driving around base to various offices and filling out a bunch of paperwork. I'm sure Monday will be the same, plus a dental appointment on top of it all. But just getting here and seeing everything, and finding out my class dates, makes it feel much more real than a set of orders and a "hey, we'll see you when you get here!" feeling. Turns out, by the way, that I won't be here at Randolph for as long as I thought. More like half as long. So it's kind of hard to decide if i really want to unpack everything and get settled if I'm just going to end up moving in a few months anyways. Another thing I found out today is that I should be finding out my follow on assignment fairly quickly, like mid-May, instead of all the way at the end of my training. It's all becoming clearer as to what's going to happen to me.
What has my brain completely out-of-whack, however, is that all that's expected of me between now and when I start my classes is to in-process, study what I can, and help out with odd jobs when they come up. Going from leading a flight of 70+ people, 50+ emails a day, meetings, taskers, deployments, etc., to basically only being expected to show up to work on time and not get into trouble is mind boggling to me. And the icing on the cake is that my hours are now 0800-1500, instead of 0700ish-1700ish. I'm not going to know what to do with myself these next few weeks with all this free time!
It's also very weird for me to be considered a "flyer" now. Going through in-processing and claiming active flyer status, getting my new patches for my flight suit, and meeting my new squadron commander who has flown fighters throughout his career. It's all very surreal to me. I'm sure I'll feel kind of dirty and wrong when I get my flight suits and gear on Tuesday. Coming from a maintenance background, these are the people I would butt heads with on a weekly basis about aircraft availability and scheduling. Now I'm one of them. I've crossed over to the dark side!
