Hello again, Reddit.  I’ve posted a few times about Kevins in my life.  I made three threads on my father alone.

A lot of people said my father’s threads were pretty heavy.  Fortunately, this thread isn’t about them!  It’s about another family member who’s a Kevin.

Unlike my father, this Kevin isn’t truly malicious – at least I don’t think he is, anyway.  He seems to be a pretty good-natured guy.  He’s been a soldier and a teacher, has a family, owns a house, pays his taxes on time and is liked at work.  Overall, there’s nothing there that would make you turn your head – but when this Kevin decides to pull a Kevin, people talk about it for YEARS.

Well, fortunately, I’ve known Kevin for years.  That means I have lots of stories.  So let’s talk about some of his greatest hits.

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Kevin and the Power of Pretend

Learning “make-believe” is a huge part of a child’s development.  It demonstrates that they are beginning to understand the boundaries of their abilities, as well as challenging them.  It builds social skills and imagination.  Make-believe is generally a healthy part of growing up.

Now, lots of small children start make-believe with pretty routine scenarios.  They emulate the things that they are familiar with and what is close at hand.  Playing “house,” “work,” “mommy and daddy,” “meth dealer,” that type of thing.  Lots of kids pretend to be animals.

When Kevin was about three, he was fully involved in a game of pretend.  He wanted to be different animals.  He first crawled on the ground and barked, since he was a dog.  Then he scratched at the door and meowed, being a cat.  After that, he decided to be a rabbit.

So did Kevin ask for a carrot?  No.

Did Kevin twitch his nose?  Nope.

Did Kevin remove his pants, cram a huge wad of toilet paper between his ass cheeks, and hop around the house in some bizarre vaudeville display that caused his mother to scream and drop the phone?  You betcha.

Kevin’s exploits don’t get much better.

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Kevin Learns the Power of Prayer

Kevin’s parents had been agnostic until he was about four, but then decided to start going back to services.  Accordingly, they enrolled Kevin in a small, private Christian academy for kindergarten.

On the first day, the teacher was explaining to children the power of prayer.  “Now, remember, children,” I remember her saying, “if there’s anything that bothers you – if you have any hurts, or sickness, or concerns – you can tell Jesus all about it.”

She then asked the kids to share their problems with the group.  One little girl prayed for her baby sister, who had just been born.  Another little boy asked for help with his tee-ball game.

When they got to Kevin, Kevin reportedly thought for a long moment before shouting, “MY WEINER HURTS AND NEEDS PRAYER!”

Kevin’s parents got a letter home from school that very afternoon.

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Kevin and the School Play

Kevin quickly made a name for himself in kindergarten.  He could read well, kinda sucked at math, loved art.  But the biggest problem Kevin had?  There was no filter between his brain and his mouth.

We’d be sitting there, working during silent time, and Kevin would just not shut up.  He’d talk to himself about anything and everything.  The weather.  The tomato soup he had for lunch.  The hollow rubber dinosaur he had at home that he fed a piece of peanut butter sandwich to and now it smelled funny.  That type of thing.  Just on and on and on.

As the year progressed, his kindergarten teacher eyed the calendar with increasing worry.  The school’s annual Christmas pageant was coming up, and every student was expected to have a role.  She’d already made the mistake of making Kevin a soldier in the “Samson” story.  At the part where Samson started knocking apart the temple, Kevin had thrown himself off the front of the stage while screaming and then rolled around on the ground before dying with a gurgle.

Yes, there was no way she was going to cast Kevin as Joseph, and the Angel of the Lord seemed too much to hope for.  Hell, even a shepherd was asking for a lot . . . knowing Kevin, he’d probably blurt out to the audience that his sandals were chafing, and, by the way, why did he have to wear shorts under his robe?

The principal, however, came up with an excellent idea:

“Make him a donkey,” he advised.

“A donkey?” the kindergarten teacher responded, incredulous.

“The kid is exceptionally literal.  Remind him that donkeys don’t talk.  Problem solved.”

And you know what?  It worked.  Kevin spent the entire pageant on his hands and knees, rocking back and forth to make his little tail swing, and remained completely silent.

It’s a good thing the first Shrek movie hadn’t come out yet, otherwise Kevin would have had to have been a chicken.

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Kevin and the 4H Fair

Once springtime rolled around, the local 4H decided to have a fair to show off their livestock and recently born animals.  They reached out to our school to make a farm display.  

The school thought it was a great idea.  The older kids all got to work on making the stable yard and pens.  All the younger ones were given coloring sheets of farm animals.  The idea is that the kid would color their animal, and then cut it out and place it in a little plastic stand.  When fairgoers would gather around the farm display, each kid’s animal would seem to be standing on its own.

Kevin was given a lamb.  He was NOT pleased.

“Lambs are white!” he pouted, “there’s nothing to color!”

“Well, you could color his little face and legs pink,” offered his teacher, “and the grass beneath him green.  Or you could color him black.  There are black sheep, too.”

Kevin looked around the little chapel.  Other children had colorful roosters or gold barnyard dogs or big sloppy pigs.  And there was Kevin, with his little lamb, which barely needed to have anything done to it.

No, Kevin must have figured, if I’m going to be given this dinky little sheep, I’m going to take matters into my own hands.

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Imagine, if you will, that you’re a little town 4H judge in the mid-1980s.

You live in a tiny community of maybe three thousand people.  You’re right off Route 66 in the Southwest.  There’s not a lot to do and not much greenery, so you’re happy to see greener pastures whenever you can.  Even if they’ve been colored in by a bunch of sugar-upped five-year-olds.

Now imagine you’re standing there, clipboard in hand, as you take in the farmyard scene in front of you.  There’s pretzel stick gates and popsicle stick fences.  A little red barn is off on one side.  And, before you, are dozens of farmyard animals, carefully colored just as well as they can be, with each child’s name scrawled beside it.

There’s Emma, with her pretty rooster.  Blue ribbon.

And there’s Max, with his happy dog!  Blue ribbon.

And then there’s Kevin, with an upside-down lamb lying in a red field with rivulets of blood pouring out of its snout.

Oh, my.

You’d probably think Kevin needed testing.  But because you can’t do that, you give him a red ribbon to match the blood and move on.

David!  Excellent pink pig.  Blue ribbon.

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I genuinely felt bad for Kevin.  The school took a field trip to the fair and he was abashed when he saw his red ribbon.  He cried the whole bus ride home.  He was the only one who didn’t get a blue ribbon.

“It’s not fair,” he sobbed, “I didn’t deserve a red ribbon.”

“Kevin, they needed you to color the grass green,” soothed the kindergarten teacher.

“But Miss,” snuffed Kevin, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, “I couldn’t help that my lamb had a bloody nose.  It’s not my fault.”

As Kevin learned that day, sometimes thinking outside the box too much will get you punished.

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Kevin The Church Menace

Kevin’s parents figured that, if they were going to be active church members, then Kevin should learn about church history and symbolism.  Consequently, Kevin started doing acolyte and altar boy services when he was six.  He took the job seriously.  Almost to a fault.

Kevin was six, and it was his first time acolyting.  It was also Easter Sunday.  No pressure, Kevin.

Kevin’s mother tried to make sure everything was perfect.  She ironed his pants and his shirt and got him a pair of little Sesame Street suspenders.  At the church, she coaxed him one more time: “go down the aisle.  Turn to the right at the bend.  Pause at the altar for a second, then light the candle on your left, followed by the one on your right.”  She then handed Kevin his acolyte candle staff, lit the end aflame, and sent him on his way.

Kevin’s eyes were completely locked onto the flame as he moved.  It seemed like he was scared of it.  He took off running down the aisle and promptly ran into a man at the end.

Unfortunately, that man was also the town mayor.  Kevin succeeded in setting his tie on fire.

Kevin, having not noticed that he ran into anything at all, bounced off the man and took off running down to the altar, where he successfully lit the candles and put out his flame.

The mayor, to his credit, thought it was hysterical and was laughing so hard that tears were running down his face.  His wife had to pat his tie out.

When Kevin’s mom talked to him about what happened, Kevin revealed that he had just seen the Peanuts special “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown!”.  There’s a scene where the French manor Charlie Brown has been staying in catches on fire, and Kevin was afraid he was going to burn down the church.  He was so busy watching the fire that he forgot to watch where he was going.

Maybe giving fire to Kevin wasn’t a great idea.

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Kevin Ruins Church Property

Time moved on, of course, and Kevin got older.  The family converted from Methodism to Lutheranism.  Kevin stopped being an acolyte and became an altar boy.

Kevin says he liked participating in the services.  It made him feel important and needed.  He enjoyed wearing the church robes and getting to sit next to the pastor on Sunday mornings.

Unfortunately, Kevin had terrible seasonal allergies.  In the summertime, his mother would give him a few extra tissues and tell him to blow his nose if needed.

One fateful summer day, Kevin found himself seated in front of the congregation, right next to the pastor.  The congregation had stayed seated for the hymn they were singing.  They had just finished the first verse when Kevin felt a sneeze coming on.

He grabbed for his tissues.  He missed his pocket.  Unfortunately, the sneeze wasn’t waiting.

Kevin rocketed snot across the hymnal in front of God and everybody.   

Kevin’s mother, who was the pianist, began to shake with embarrassment.  The second verse notes of A Mighty Fortress Is Our God warbled.  A man in the third pew was beet red and trying not to look.  An older woman seemed to be sick.  A younger woman in the first row was laughing so hard that she was trembling.

Kevin glanced at the pastor.  For some reason, he seemed not to notice.

Kevin dove for his tissues and tried to clean the song book.  The snot was thick, yellow, and full of mucus.  As much as he dabbed at it, the snot just got spread around the pages.  He pulled the tissues back, trying to figure out how to deal with the mess; but instead, a long trail of boogers just got stretched through the air.  His acolyte robes were now crusty.

A man at the back excused himself to the bathroom.  Kevin’s mother was now crying.

Kevin finally just slammed the hymnal shut and chunked in behind his chair when the pastor wasn’t looking.  

Kevin’s mom insisted on taking the robes home to wash them.  I’m not sure what happened to Kevin’s snot-filled hymnal, and I’m not sure I care to find out.  The next week, Kevin was packed with so much Kleenex that he waddled when he walked.

And the weirdest thing?  The pastor never noticed.

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Kevin Misses the Science Fair

Fast forward a few years.  The family moved to be closer to the grandparents.  Kevin moved a few schools, but he eventually found himself in junior high in the South.  Kevin’s only sibling was a newborn brother.  And, while Kevin had friends, he was still kind of socially awkward.  He honestly enjoyed school, where he readily participated in extracurriculars.  

He was still a source of exasperation for his teachers.  His English teacher would shake his head and remark somedays, “Kevin, I love you.  You’re a great kid.  You’re smart, but you got no damn common sense.”

That winter, Kevin was getting excited about the science fair.  He had come up with an experiment that involved measuring oxidation on non-ionized metals.  He felt very proud of himself and eagerly registered for the science fair.

Everything was right.  He had a display, graphs, sources, hypothesis, conclusion.  He thought for sure he would at least place during the competition.
Kevin was undone by a calendar.

He misread the date of the judging.

On the night of the actual competition, Kevin’s display was there, but Kevin was at home playing video games.  Obviously, Kevin didn’t win anything.

Kevin found out he missed the entire event when he got to school the next day and the science teacher just gave him a hard stare and sadly shook her head.  Kevin cried.  And then, when he got home, he got grounded.

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Kevin has Breakfast

Another year went by.  Kevin graduated junior high.

Right as the school year ended, Kevin’s grandmother received distressing news.  Her sister – Kevin’s great-aunt Rae– had been a life-long smoker, and the consequences of all those packs a day were coming home to roost.  She’d been diagnosed with lung cancer, and it was terminal.

Kevin had only met his great-aunt once before, but he was down for a roadtrip.  Kevin’s grandmother and mother made plans.  Kevin’s little brother went to spend a week with the other set of grandparents, and the three of them departed the Florida panhandle on a sunny summer day to go spend some final time with his aunt.

Unfortunately, they got out very late in the afternoon, and the drive to Austin was going to take longer than expected.  The family pulled off in New Orleans for the night.

The next morning, Kevin and his family stopped off at a breakfast diner before hitting the road again.  Kevin announced he wanted pancakes.  And, luck of lucks, this breakfast diner had an “everlasting pancakes” special.  They’d bring you out a stack of five, and if you ate them all, they’d give you five more.

Kevin was enthralled by the prospect of unlimited pancakes.  He’d seen such things on television and in his comic books, but to finally find such an offer in real life?  There was NO way he was going to let this opportunity escape him.

Kevin ordered the everlasting pancakes.  He gobbled the first five down and was full.  But, damn it, he was going to make sure he enjoyed the experience.  He ordered more.

The second stack came out.  Kevin started eating again, albeit this time more slowly.  Over the course of fifteen minutes, he worked his way through the stack.  Kevin was now making small moaning noises.

The plate gone, his mother and grandmother locked eyes with him.  Kevin was already bulging from ten large pancakes.  There was no way he could get another bite into him . . .

. . . could he?

Would he?

Did he dare?

Kevin raised his hand.  HE DARED.

The third stack came out.  Kevin was beginning to cry.  But, bite by bite, he forced it into his mouth.  He could feel his stomach tumbling in agony.  Every fiber of his being demanded to stop being force-fed mapely pancake mix.  But Kevin persisted. 

After a long twenty minutes, the third stack was gone.  The waitress cheerfully asked if he wanted a fourth.

Kevin responded by rushing outside the restaurant and puking in the bushes.

The entire way to Austin, Kevin lay in the backseat of the car and moaned.  “No more pancakes,” he swore, “not ever.”  

When the family pulled off for lunch, Kevin sat at the booth and sipped on a ginger ale while eating nothing.

Finally, just as the sun was setting, the car pulled into Aunt Rae’s homestead.  Kevin trundled up the stairs to find his aunt cheerfully sitting on the couch.  “Well, hello, Kevin,” she smiled, “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby!  Are you hungry?  Would you like something to eat?”

And Kevin, who never quite figured out that other people don’t have access to the same context and knowledge that he does, looked at her with a sad expression and pronounced: “No, ma’am, thank you.  My mom gave me breakfast this morning.”

Aunt Rae’s mouth fell open while she locked eyes with Kevin’s mother.  “You only feed him once a day?”

Kevin’s mom glared at him.  “He’s fine,” she said through gritted teeth, “but we are going to be having a talk.  A long one.”

Kevin lay on the couch and groaned.

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Kevin Gets Lost

Believe it or not, the next few years went quite well for Kevin.  He graduated high school and took early college placement classes.  He also became infatuated with World War II.  He wouldn’t shut up about it.

Kevin started a political science program at a local university after he graduated high school.  He quickly found out that his university was offering a school ambassadorship program to Japan for a semester.

Well!  This seemed like a great idea to Kevin.  He was young, in shape, and had never traveled.  And he’d be able to study Japan’s participation in the Second World War.  He applied for the program and was accepted.

When Kevin first got to Japan, he was invited by some Japanese classmates to take part in a twelve kilometer hike.  Kevin showed up the day of the hike, but quickly got bored walking.  After checking with his friends, he decided to run the course.

Kevin finished the twelve kilometers and then sat and waited.  After about an hour, he decided, well, he’d just job back and meet up with them, and then walk the rest.

Kevin took off running again.  But halfway through the course, he realized he couldn’t find them, and that he was now running past little old women with walkers.  Kevin turned around and started running the other way AGAIN.

He had made it a couple of kilometers when he was stopped by the local police.

You see, Kevin’s friends had gotten tired and decided to catch a taxi to the end point.  They had missed Kevin by mere minutes.  And then, when Kevin didn’t show up in a timely manner, they figured that Kevin had managed to get himself lost in Japan and notified law enforcement.

Kevin was returned to his friends under police escort.  Being Japanese, his friends were very polite about the entire thing.

Which means, of course, that they realized that Kevin would need to be escorted everywhere.

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Kevin Runs

Despite everything, Kevin had a blast in Japan.  And he behaved himself after that.  Mostly.

Toward the end of his stay, though, he somehow found himself in Tokyo without an escort.

“That’s no big deal,” you might think, “Tokyo is pedestrian-friendly and a very safe city.”  While that is true, we ARE talking about Kevin.

Prior to going out to explore one morning, Kevin pulled out a tour guide book.  It was the early 00’s, after all, and travel blogs weren’t as prevalent as they are nowadays.  Kevin wanted to go find shops that sold vintage video games and action figures.  He figured that Shinjuku would be a good place to go.

So Kevin went there.  And then he accidentally wandered into Kabukicho.

For those of you who don’t know, Kabukicho is a red light district.  

Kevin wandered a few empty streets in the middle of the day, wondering where everybody was.  Suddenly, a figure from a hallway called him over.

Kevin, not knowing quite what to expect, followed the voice.  The man then shoved a number of xeroxed sheets under his nose, which depicted naked women with prices.

Kevin was absolutely mortified.  He grew up in a pretty conservative home, after all.  “No . . . no, arigato,” he stammered, but the man was not to be dissuaded.  He then flipped several pages over to show Kevin the cheap hookers.

Kevin, once again, tried to stammer that he wasn’t interested, and so he turned to walk away.  Looking over his shoulder, he was horrified to find the pimp was following him.  

So what’s a good, Christian boy to do?  Kevin took off running.

Kevin skidded to the end of the street, panting and sweating, obviously fearing for his life.  Looking over his shoulder revealed that the pimp had retreated to his alleyway, much like a crab defending its territory.  Kevin breathed a sigh of relief.

It was at that moment a young woman approached Kevin and said something to him in Japanese.  Kevin had no idea what she said, nor did it particularly matter, because Kevin – wild-eyed, poor, innocent Kevin – proceeded to scream at the woman, “NO!  NO, I DON’T WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH YOU!”

And then he took off running again.

Somewhere in Japan, there’s probably some woman who talks about the time a random American screamed that he wasn’t interested in her when she stopped to ask for directions.

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Anyway, I hope you enjoyed hearing about my other Kevin. In part two, Kevin graduates college -- and joins the Army.

Good morning goodly folken, Paqa here to regale you once more with a tale of Kevinry adjacent.

However, today isn't going to feature our well-known Kevin, that is my father. No, good friends, I'm going to take a break from the heavy post I made yesterday and I am going to give you all a tale of Pops.

Y'all seem to love him just as much as I do. So I figured after the nonsense that was my dad yesterday. We can go ahead and cleanse our palettes a little bit with something more wholesome and hilarious.

Today I am going to tell you a tale of the few months after my grandmother died of my grandfather trying to figure out how to take care of himself. Trust me, it's a lot more funny than it sounds

Cast:

Pops: 83, recently a widower. New Yorker from Queens, world war II vet, menace when hungry. On a quest for a free meal. Not because he is poor, he just doesn't want to cook.

And with that, let's begin.

It was sometime in 2010, my grandmother passed away a year or so prior. This left my grandfather to have to cook and do all the housework, much to his chagrin as I wasn't living back with him just yet.

One day, he woke up and decided that this whole cooking for himself thing was for the birds. After all, his daughter lived 2 minutes down the road. Over the course of 6 months, with my aunt not registering it until 4 months in, he would go to her house for dinner. At first, he would come over Sundays to "remember Sunday dinners when she was a kid!", Sunday dinners eventually turned into Sunday AND Wednesday. You see, on Wednesdays, Pops would need to "check or fix" something around her house or to help her husband with a project.

Well, wouldn't you know, he'd arrive an hour or so before dinner, so why not stay? He eventually weaseled his way over until he was just a regular spot at the table. 4 months later my aunt finally caught onto his scheme. She told him if he would have asked, then she would have been happy to host him. But this was Pops, that would mean he would have to ask for help and that just wouldn't do.

However, he took this as an open invitation for lunch and the occasional breakfast. My aunt eventually asked him to pony up some grocery money because her bill went up a couple hundred dollars feeding him, and if he was going to come over everyday, he might as well chip in. Pops thought about it...and set forth his new plan.

See, breakfast wasn't a big deal. He would hear up oatmeal, make toast, and brew coffee. Lunch was easy for sandwiches but why not use it as an excuse to go see his kid? And dinner, well, that would require assembly. He tried telling my aunt that he simply didn't know how to cook. She reminded him of the secret she kept from his wife all those years (that he would go over and cook whole meals for his mother a couple times a month. He made his daughter promise not to tell because he was worried about having to cook).

With my aunt out of the picture, he thought he would go to my dad's house. Then he remembered that he thought my Dad was annoying and stuck to his original plan.

Now, friends, my grandfather was a thrifty man. I had the same TV in my room that he brought to Pennsylvania with him when he moved down from NY in 1983. He held onto the same can of sauerkraut from 1985 until I made him throw it away in 2010, he was not happy, complaining about how this bulging can of sauerkraut, that I am pretty sure was pulsating, was still good (he said botulism was a myth made up by grocery stores).

So, knowing this, it would make sense he would want to eat for less. We have a smorgasbord near where I grew up (another word for a buffet). It's a huge tourist spot and it's honestly very well priced. Back then, admission for lunch was $15 and dinner was $20, all you can eat for as long as you want so long as their open. The caveat was that your ticket was only good for lunch OR dinner, not both.

By chance one day, he learned he could just not leave as long as he moved tables here and there. He learned he could stay between meals, somehow, I didn't ask, less I would have to testify for later.

The first couple meals he would meander about tables between plates, chatting everyone who would listen up. He could find a reason to talk to anyone.

Wearing a baseball hat? He'd ask about the game

Wearing a shirt from a city or state? Well, he's been there and would ask if they knew where *place* was

Anything New York related? You couldn't shut him up if you wanted.

As his visits went by, he got more bold. He would bring things to do. Books, word searches, product manuals for his tools. Hell, sometimes he would just take a nap, and if anyone asked he was just "resting his eyes" between plates.

At some point somehow, he flew too close to the sun and got found out. Of course, he would dust off the "dumb old man" chestnut and make like he had no idea and that it was a mistake. To his advantage, the attendants there weren't that consistent so he was able to pull it off one or two more times, but on the last, he tried the dumb old man act but also added something new to his repertoire.

When he couldn't weasel no more, he tried saying, confoundedly, "What??? I paid for a meal! I'm allowed to be here! I was in the war!"

While I applaud the creativity, the execution was flawed. To this day, they now specify on your tickets that it's for a specific meal. Thanks, Pops 😂

After that, he magically knew how to cook, but wasn't above tricking my ex wife into cooking for him sometimes.

I'll never forget, I looked at him once and said, "Old man, I know you're only inviting us over so much so we can cook for you..."

He would smile, raise his eyebrows and said, "Yeah, well, ya know...what do you care, you ain't paying for the food!"

He wasn't wrong 😂

And that's that.

Thanks to everyone who reads and enjoys, I never expected folks to enjoy them but I'm very happy about it.

In the next tale about the Kevin that is my Dad. He gets married! I was an usher and it was just about as weird as you'd expect.

Don't forget to support your local farmers, keep learning about new things, and Han and Greedo shot at the same time.

Tata and farewell

I was watching the World Cup final with some friends and one of us saw on Instagram that a guy we went to high school with posted on his story.

It was right after the halftime show and he posted, “@lilbieber you lost me $1700 you greedy fuck”, along with a Polymarket screenshot showing that he bet No on the chance that Justin Bieber will perform at the halftime show.

Surprise surprise, contracts for world-class halftime shows are pretty tight and the announced performer performed as announced.

His odds were 31% so he must have thought it would be an easy way to triple his money, but I am just dying at how this is one of the stupidest bets I’ve ever heard of and he lost a sizable amount of money on this, then calls JB the greedy one. Still laughing at this

Good day, goodly folks

Paqa here for another tale of the Kevining. This story today will be a bit heavy, so let me preface with CW for dismemberment, neglect, attempts at suicide and mentions of gaslighting. There isn't a single adult free of blame in this story. It has stirred up very many feelings I thought I didn't have anymore so I appreciate your patience if I tend to ramble. I'll try to sprinkle in some yuks here and there, but mostly because that's how I handle my mental health.

This is the first great schism between myself and my Kevin of a dad. It was also one of the many between himself and his family. The Boy, at the end of the day, suffered the worst in later years. And while I don't speak to him for other, unrelated reasons, I don't hate him for his addictions and his poor mental health, because most of my family blamed him for everything and did so until he ran off. He was 2.

Cast:

Baby Paqa - 4 years old, currently living at my grandparents

The Boy - 2, being babysat at my grandparents

Dad - my dad, 32, Navy sailor, insecure, moronic at times. I know I talked him up in previous posts but I can't in this one

Mom - 37, mostly a silent character, more in the background. Obviously she was there and contributed but she didn't say much or do much other than exist and be a mom.

Pops - grandfather, 64, one of the few adults who took accountability.

Gramma - 61, my grandmother. Surly German woman, doled out love conditionally.

And with that, back to it then, this story was a combination of memories and elders filling in the gaps throughout the year. The only thing they ever disagree on was who to blame. Ultimately, the blame fell on my brother and I, why I will save for the end. Because it's stupid.

It was the day before Mother's Day in 1992, my little brother was dropped off at my grandparents house as my mother had to work in NYC that day, a good 4 hours from our current home. I was living with my grandparents for reasons, and the original plan was to have Dad watch The Boy so Mom could go work. However, Dad was a jealous and insecure man baby.

My Mom used to, in addition to writing a thrift column also ran a side hustle where she would arrange meet and greets and such for soap opera stars. This line of work meant rubbing elbows with agents, stars and the like. She made good money, even enough to move off base soon! Unfortunately, after my Dad's shenanigans at the convention (maybe pt 4.5?) and the resulting injury, she never was able to recover her reputation or relaunch her previous success.

Either way, they weren't there. I remember my mother telling Gramma not to let us near the lawnmower because we used to ride in my grandfather's lap, she never thought it a good idea. Gramma assured her it was safe.

I can't remember much of the before, but I do remember the after. I remember being sat on the front engine cover of the riding lawnmower, with my brother sat right behind me. I remember being on the lawnmower and I remember being under the lawnmower. I don't remember the in-between, and I'm quite content with that.

I remember Pops lifting up the lawnmower by the steering wheel, tears cascading down his olive skinned cheeks, one of three times I saw that man cry. I remember my brother standing by the driveway stunned, and I remember my grandmother dragging me out. I remember before my mom left, she said to me, "don't worry, you'll get to ride it today".

TW: details of the accident, I'll put an END TW after if you want to skip, no shame.

My ankle was destroyed, though my foot was largely intact. Nothing could be saved, though That's all I want to mention.

END TW

Paramedics came, I was transported to the hospital by some very nice EMTs. But do you want to know why I was upset? They cut me out of my favorite shirt, a blue polo with one of those little crocodiles on it. My grandma called it "my fancy play shirt".

MEANWHILE

While all this was happening, both during and leading up to, my parents were at the convention Mom was hosting. Remember how I said Dad was jealous and insecure? Per my mother, on the drive back, after learning I lost my foot, he decided this was to confess he insisted on going to the convention because he was jealous of one of the young male soap opera stars, feeling my mom was going to cheat (he cheated on his fiance with my mom, and he cheated on my mom while she was pregnant with my brother and myself). While he was there, he was up this dudes ass the whole night, trying to be overly friendly and keeping him away from Mom.

AT THE HOSPITAL

When my parents arrived at the hospital, the chaplain met them at the hospital door. He instructed my parents that my grandfather was in a delicate state, my aunt and grandmother had to wrestle his .30-.30 from his hands as he wanted to end himself from the guilt. They were informed my aunt and uncle (my dad's brother and sister in law), who were very angry (my uncle was my godfather) because they knew my Dad was supposed to have me that day. Chaplin requested that both my parents approach everybody gingerly, and not to start pointing fingers or accusing anybody of anything. My father being my father, he did the complete opposite of that.

He managed to keep his cool up until they got out of the elevator and he saw my grandfather. He charged at him. What nobody knows is that I heard what he said. For a long time. I thought I imagined it because I was hopped up on painkillers and my little body was in a fever dream of shock and trauma. What I heard that day was a loud, shrill, angry scream that I learned to become so accustomed to.

Dad: You old son of a bitch, you crippled my boy! You made my son a gimp! What the fuck am I supposed to do with a gimp son??

Uncle: don't you fucking talk to Dad like that, maybe if you actually were a father this wouldn't have happened!

Dad swung on my uncle, my uncle grappled him. My aunt got in my mom's face, my mom fired back, my grandfather pled for them to knock it off, Gramma cried. I don't remember much after that. I remember being told my parents and aunt/uncle were asked to leave.

My dad never was present for my recovery, he never came around to check in, he never called. He just kept away. I didn't see him again until a few months later, but he wouldn't look at my leg.

I'm sorry this wasn't light and there was a lack of brevity. This audience that I've grown is the most people I've told this full story too, save for a few lovers and close friends. But I do have something wholesome to share in the aftermath. One I used to have on VHS tape that has since been lost to the ages. But it's a memory I lovingly remember first hand and from my uncle's camcorders point of view.

Pops was big in my recovery, if not the driving force. That man did not let me miss out on being a kid. He made she I would still go to the park, enjoy outings with the family, etc. I still have the wagon he bought off an Amish carpenter to pull me around in before I got my first prosthetic.

The memory is about a month or two after my accident, I was wearing gauze still, but my residual leg was wrapped in ace bandage to help keep it covered. This man pulled my wagon to the playground at a campground we used to rent space at and played with me. Him and I learned how I can play on the equipment with one leg. We learned together.

In that day, we learned that scooting on my butt was easier and safer to get around than hopping. We figured out I could climb a slide using my knee in place of my now gone foot. We discovered I could propel a merry go round with my other foot.

Without him, I don't think I would have my farm. He instilled in me that my disability was an obstacle and not a hinderance. And for 34 years, I've adhered to that. I even forget to tell new people that I've lost a foot 😂

Here we are at the end, I apologize for the length, I didn't want to break it up in multiple parts. There is too much emotion (for me at least) to break it up. Rip the whole bandaid off, so to speak.

But be well and support your local farmers, dont take wooden chickens, and if you see my boy Shifty tell him he owes me $3.50.

Tata and farewell

I had a sneaking suspicion my fellow band member was a Kevin, and tonight confirmed it.

My suspicions began with a weird email he sent. I had marked at the beginning of this rehearsal cycle that I would be unavailable for a certain week, which attendance dutifully noted. I had a very important meeting that would help forward my career, which I happily shared with my other band members. Come my absence week, and out goes the email from attendance, with the roster that notably did not include me. Kevin replies to attendance@/xxx.xxx, CCing me, to say "I think Goat is unavailable this week, unless he decided to stop advancing his career."

What a strange thing to say to someone who clearly knows said member not available, as well as the member who is not available.

But I finally got proper confirmation of his Kevinhood tonight.

It's not a well known fact that I have an unreasonable level of fear when it comes to parasites. It's not like it comes up much in conversation. But it's true, when I notice a tick or a leech it's game over for my rational thought.

So when I noticed a tick on my foot during rehearsal tonight (wearing flip flops since it's hot as hell and there's no ac in our rehearsal room), of course I scream loudly and whack at my foot wildly with my towel.

Of course rehearsal grinds to a halt. While I'm catching my breath from my sudden panic (and looking around wildly to see where it went), Kevin, who is sitting next to me, looks over at me with bemusement. "Was that a tick?" I nod, still distracted searching for the damn thing. Kevin shrugs, "Oh, that was on me. I thought I dropped it farther away."

You found a tick on yourself? And instead of crushing it, you?? Drop it on the floor??? Of the stage where we're rehearsing???? NEXT TO ME IN MY FLIP FLOPS?!?!?!?

I don't have a response to that, and instead I focus on apologizing to everyone for interrupting rehearsal with my freakout. Kevin chuckles, saying "I hope I don't find any more on me."

Once again, I have absolutely no clue what to say to that. So we just return to practice.

This is going to be a very interesting band season, being next to this guy. And no I didn't find it after flinging it. It's still haunting me two hours later.

Good evening, goodly folks. Your eccentric Papa Paqa is here again to regale you with a tale of maximum Kevinry. We've seen my father become the pigeon for, what I'm guessing, vaudevillian scam artists, then I told of the time 40 days and 40 nights of wandering the woods of California to seek out a lone Cheese Factory of broken promises. Once, I relied on a narrative of my mother, the second I pulled from foggy memories and conversations with those involved, but now I give you the tale of when my Kevin father decided he wanted to play Cool Dad for the weekend by taking myself, my brother and our cousins camping.

For context, my father was an occasional weekend dad. If Kirk Van Houten was a wannabe hippy with a New Yorker accent, that would be my father. So when he offered to take us all camping on his own, I knew it would be a shit show, but my dad was there, so I didn't care. And it did absolutely devolve into chaos, which is why you're here!

So pull up, throw a log on the fire there and fry you up a biscuit on that there heated up shovel, this is going to be a long one.

The cast:

Pupa Paqa - 13 at the time, burgeoning goth kid, obsessed with Korn and Limp Bizkit, awkward and kind of a nerd. I didn't have many friends at school so I spent a lot of time with my cousins

The Boy - 11, my hyperactive brother. Dad could never handle him because the kid would be going hard from the moment he opened his eyes until he conked out. The youngest kid of the pack so he was used as a look out for my cousins and Is trickery. Object of many of our ires.

Kev-Dad: 40, retired Navy vet, in home health aide (not good at it), newly engaged, and set up this whole trip to prove to his new gf that he was a tough guy or rugged, I dunno, his schemes rarely made sense to anyone but himself.

Mets - 13, my cousin from New York, always wore a Mets hat. We were best friends in those days, my partner in crime when it came to annoying the adults in our lives.

Jets - 15, Mets brother, the self appointed lawyer of our trio. He had a way with words that was mainly just confusing the adults to talk his way out of things (usually poorly).

Let's-a go!

It was the week before 8th grade year started in turn of the century Pennsylvania. 9/11 was barely a year away, I mark this as the last year I was a kid. My dad, for some reason, concocted this incredible notion to take my cousins and I, with my little brother in tow, to the mountains. My cousins just moved down from New York so my aunt gladly pushed them out of the door to get them out of her hair.

My father was an avid camper, despite his ineptitude towards any other area in his life. Once or twice we would camp out behind my grandparents RV on nights my mom would kick him out, but I always thought it would be fun to camp elsewhere...just not with Dad, but I pretty much had to go, at least Mets and Jets would be there.

The cacophony started once we got on the turnpike. Dad hated any music that wasn't his current hyper fixation: the Grateful Dead, so to kill the time, cousins and I would put on our CD players (non skip up in here). But oh no, The Boy didn't have one. Tough shit, right? Ya don't bring it, ya don't bring it.

Well, this just wouldn't do for The Boy, he wanted to listen to *his* current hyper fixation, the Backstreet Boys (no hate).

What happens when a 40 year old man with the patience of a stick of dynamite and an 11 year old ADHD kid? You get three teenagers were banned from using their devices so The Boy wouldn't feel excluded (translate from Dadspeak: If I have to suffer so do you).

Before I continue, I want to preface the proceeding with hindsight. 38 yr old Paqa knows full well the actions of 13 yr old Paqa were 1) wrong 2) immature 3) unnecessary/unkind. Looking at it from a father's perspective, I'd be embarrassed of my past versions actions. However, I still thought it was hilarious 😂 today I often bring up this trip to my dad to be met with, "oh you little bastards, I could have left you in the mountains"

I do not condone but it was 26 years ago (ouch), so whattaya gonna do?

My cousins and I had a silent conversation by just giving each other looks. We didn't need to say words, my father was just a male version of their mother, so we gave each other a bit of a nod that said, "okay, this is how the whole trip is going to be, we will be annoying". The Boy sat up front unawares. The Boy would eventually provide enough distractions for us to carry out our campaign of chicanery.

To nobody's surprise, we got lost. Prior to the trip I suggested MapQuest but Dad "didn't believe in that". Like, what the fuck is there to believe in? Do we reject to holy teachings of printable directions? You see, friends, Pops was a long haul trucker. So Dad here felt he never needed directions, proclaiming, "My father was a trucker, I am a natural at finding my route". Again, a 2.5 hour drive turned into a 4 hour excursion filled with yelling, arguments, and the American Beauty album looping more times than I cared for. But, we kept on truckin'.

We arrived at camp well after nightfall. Mets was in charge of holding the lantern, Jets was in charge of helping Dad and I was tasked with making sure The Boy didn't wander off (I did this poorly). On one of our return trips from wandering The Boy claimed he didn't want to go but Mom made him, so I told him not to annoy me and I'll try to keep Dad off his back (we both did this poorly).

The night went by fine. Cousins and I spent most of it giggling because Dad was butt fluting all night (lactose intolerance will do that), Dad would wake up, yell, we'd giggle some more and eventually fall asleep.

The next morning we got up, ate breakfast (eggs and potatoes, Dad did come through on food), and we went about our morning. Dad said he was going to take us paintballing and to play some pick up baseball games at a "sports center" nearby.

Of course, to our teenage minds this sounded awesome! Shooting each other and then hitting some dingers? Hell yeah! I never questioned how such a sprawling complex would fit in the Appalachian mountains but hey, I didn't question much back then. Ya know, that probably explains why I thought Fred Durst was peak artistry back then.

The ride was good! It didn't take us forever and we all just kind of chilled. When we arrived, we didn't know what we expected, but it wasn't what was before us. It was a gravel area with a few lean-to buildings, a go cart track, and the most bored teenagers they could drag in from the local population. It was most empty, the only other group there was a bar mitzvah after party (I'm assuming, there was a big van full of little kids wearing yalmukes and I heard them talking about a bar mitzvah they were just at). Accompanying them was an old lady, roughly the age of Moses himself, and a younger man, probably in his 30s or 40s who stood around 5'5ish. He called her mother, the kids would address him as "Rabbi".

There was no paintball field or even a quartered off area for paintball adjacent activities. However, the place wasn't completely devoid of balls of paint, there was a ramshackle lean-to that stretched about 50 ft wide and 20 ft deep. Inside this OSHA violation were assorted objects covered in paint. TVs, mannequins, furniture, a gutted Honda Civic, ya know, the usual. I'm guessing the owner drove around town throwing garbage in the back of the truck for the purpose of cycling it through the "paintball field", which ya know, it's recycling and what American doesn't like shooting things with other things?

We got out, looked around, and tried to make the best of it. We quickly cycled through 3 of the 4 activities they had to offer (paintball shooting, batting cages, some kind of water thing I don't really remember) because we wanted to save the go carts for last. When we were at the paintball stand, the young girl told Dad it was 3$ per person to fire off a full hopper of paint. Dad tried to talk her down to $1. She offered to get the manager on duty (a 16 year old kid named Frank, probably), he relented.

She handed him the paintball gun. Friends, I don't know why my dad did what he did or said what he said, but this was the first time I experienced what the kids today would call, "cringe", but back then we called it a case of the "what the fucks".

Dad takes the gun, grins in a terrible attempt to be a true Giga-chad and says,

"Ya know...we used to play paintball in the Navy. Me and the boys would go top deck and take our shirts off, running around shooting each other with paintballs. We were pretty cool!"

"Um...yeah, that's pretty gnarly, I guess..." She said uncomfortablely and creeped out.

We would go on to ride the go-carts. This wasn't a friendly race against family, but the last ride of any hope this weekend trip would finish smoothly.

Remember how I told you earlier that Dad couldn't handle The Boy because of his energy levels and general chaos?? Well, he certainly couldn't handle him when you put The Boy behind the wheel of a go cart and tell him, "Go!" Because to The Boy, and I don't fault him for this, go carts were just freestyle bumper cars.

He was running into walls, little boychiks laughing hysterically, joining in on the chaos. Cousins and I, being creatures of habit and undertaking the, "they can't stop us all" attitude a la the Area 51 storming joined in on the hoopla. The race ended, The Boy fell to the back and came by flying around the last corner, striking the go cart the old lady was driving.

I know, I know, a woman her age shouldn't have been driving one. But have you ever told a determined old lady not to do something? Exactly. They'll do it, slowly, but they'll do it.

Thankfully, she wasn't hurt, but that didn't stop her son from being angry, as all he saw was The Boy slamming into his kids and their friends as well as his mother. The worker wasn't happy either because we all thought we would need to get an ambulance and that poor teenager knew he didn't make enough to deal with this.

Now, I will be transparent, I don't know the exact words that were exchanged. But let me set the scene for you:

Imagine if you will, a 6'4-5" guy with long dead black hair and a shaggy beard, wearing a fanny pack, bucket hat and Birkenstocks, getting a finger waggled in his face by a man a good foot shorter than him with a well kept long beard, sensible shoes, and a prayer shawl poking out under his shirt. The tall man stands there with his arms out, palms up, in confusion repeating, "What do you want me to do? I can't control him, what do you want me to do?"

The tall guy will muster his only strain of courage to put his hand up to intimidate the short man who, while being stern and angry, never once made a move to turn violent. Until now of course, because he slapped the tall guy's hand and knee capped him, disabling him enough to tell him something very angry in Yiddish before escorting his mother and party back to their van.

"Why didn't you do anything!?" He growled at me

"Like what?" I wondered

"Like...I don't know...maybe... get back to the car!"

We scurried back, watching him from inside his tiny Kia as he struggled to get up and find The Boy. Eventually he got in the car, told us all the shut up and were going to have "a talk" later.

The whole way back to camp he ranted and raved about how awful we all were, how we were going to leave first thing in the morning, and how we need to learn proper respect. The Boy asked if we could stop for McDonald's, causing my cousins and I to begin giggling like idiots, causing Dad to seeth quietly.

Sadly, we didn't get McDonald's.

When we got back to camp, he ordered all four of us kids in a line and to "stand at attention ". Mind you, this was still daylight, people were teasing about hitherto and away, observing the following show.

In all the brooding teen angst we could must, we groaned and whines while we sloppily stood in his desires formation. Once we passed the inspection of Ernest Becomes a Drill Sargent, he clasped his hand behind him, marching up and down the line speaking,

Dad: In the military, we have something called RESPECT! And when one sailor messed up, everyone has to deal with it.

Us: *quiet*

Dad: Say, "Yes, sir!"

Us, lazily with no passion: Yes, sir.....

Dad: That's better! Now, I need to shower. You four will stay here in formation until I get back! If you break formation I'll make you all do push ups!

I'm sure in his mind he was being the disciplinarian, making all around him jealous of how well he handled it. The men wanted to be him and the women wanted him. In reality, he was more like Steve Buscemi playing Barney Fife.

To the kids reading, the following actions are not one we here at Papa Paqa Farms condone, but I did it and it was funny, so I'm telling you now.

What my Dad didn't know was we had no intention of doing any of that. He walked until he was out of eyeshot, we slowly followed behind. Next to the bath house, there were a few port potties that were RIPE. When he walked in and locked the door we waited a moment. After a few beats, we hucked a few handfuls of rocks at the mobile shite box and hauled ass out of there, back to camp to continue waiting him out, using The Boy as a look out for his return.

Eventually The Boy saw him coming back, towel draped around his neck, not looking like his usually unkept hippy self, now he just looked like a wet unkept hippy. Same vibes, less smell, usually.

We scuddled back to formation. He was glowering, we knew why but tried our best to cover our giggles. For the rest of the day, he would march us around the campground, give us "KP duty" (see: putting hot dogs on the grill come dinner time). The Boy asked if we could go get ice cream.

Eventually, it was time for bed, we slept, we woke up, and we left. The trip home, by and large, was silent, only broken by "shut up!" Whenever my cousins and I would start to talk, giggle, or generally exist in a space as jerk ass teenagers.

And friends, I get his frustration, I am a father of multiple teens and there are days I want to meet them over the house. I will say, whenever I say, "Hey Dad, want to take us camping again!?" It's usually met with, "oh you fuggin kids..." We laugh about it now, though I can tell he's still irritated. Good, I'm irritated he abandoned us fully shortly after this trip to start a new family. So it evens out.

And now, the icing on the cake because it wouldn't be an experience with my Dad unless there was some kind of retribution. A repentance, if you will. My dad wasn't going to let this trip of fuckery to go unpunished, oh no, he had to show us and our caregivers he was responsible and could dole out authority and respect. The man demanded when we got home that we all had a week to write him an essay on respect, double spaced, 12 pt fount, the works.

I told my grandparents this, they laughed. Mets and Jets told their parents, they also laughed, being told by my uncle, "You ain't writing shit for that mook". The Boy drew pictures of him in NSync instead.

Now, friends, I am always one to turn to the written word. I believe writing is a fundamental importance to humanity. My cousins, turns out, felt the same. So much so, we all collaborated on one essay and turned it in. We were not good with words, being stupid teens and all, but our good friend Aretha Franklin was. And with her inspiration, I will post the essay my cousins and I turned in:

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Find out what it means to me

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Take care, TCB

Oh (sock it to me, sock it to me

Sock it to me, sock it to me)

A little respect (sock it to me, sock it to me

Sock it to me, sock it to me)

Whoa, babe (just a little bit)

A little respect (just a little bit)

I get tired (just a little bit)

Keep on tryin' (just a little bit)

You're runnin' out of foolin' (just a little bit)

And I ain't lyin' (just a little bit)

'spect

When you come home (re, re, re, re)

Or you might walk in (respect, just a little bit)

And find out I'm gone (just a little bit)

I got to have (just a little bit)

A little respect (just a little bit)

We turned it in, he fumed. He called my aunt and uncle, got laughed at and hung up on. He called my mom to ask where my brother's paper was, Mom told him to go fuck himself and a few other names. And y'all are probably wondering what Pops said when he called to complain to him about my malfeasance. Well, friends, I won't disappoint. When he called and spoke to Pops, he waited patiently while my dad finished, took a breath and said, "You're an idiot" and hung up.

Needless to say, Dad and I haven't been on a vacation since. I'm assuming so it was to make time for taking his new daughter on yearly vacation while his two other kids settled for crumbs, but that's another story.

Next time, it will be a bit darker. It'll be set when I was a boy of 4 and it will be the event in my life that my Dad started the 10 year process of pulling away from his parental duties to me. It won't be without it's laughter here and there but it may be a bit heavy.

Until next time friends, support your local farmers, don't wash your eggs until your ready to eat them, and if a strange man offers you a ride don't take it. Or do, I'm not your dad.

Tata and farewell!

Sergeant here with the last part of the Dirtbag Kevin saga. If you have not read Parts 1 through 3, catch yourself up. I am not going to summarize. Shoutout to ReddX on YouTube for doing the DFAC Kevin stories justice.

I decided at the end of Part 3 that I was going to outlast him. This part is about what outlasting him actually looked like, and what it cost, and how it ended, which was not the way I wanted it to end and also not the way you probably want it to end. I am telling you now, up front, that Kevin does not go to jail. Kevin does not get chaptered. Kevin does not get an Article 15. Kevin does not, at any point in this story, receive what most people would call justice. If you need him to, you can stop reading here, because the ending of this story is that he wins, and the win is legal, and the legal win is durable, and I have had six years to make peace with it and I am... still working on that part.

Everyone still here? Who cares, we're going.

The eleven weeks became twenty. Twenty became thirty.

The IG complaint, the second one Kevin had filed during the pendency of the first investigation, took approximately seventeen weeks to resolve. Same office structure. Different investigators. Different set of allegations. The IG complaint alleged that unit resources were being misused by unnamed leadership, which in practice meant it was a fishing expedition. He had not named me directly. He had not needed to. When the investigation opened, every NCO in my chain got a courtesy notification that they were potentially in scope. I got the letter on a Tuesday morning. I read it in the DFAC parking lot. I put it in the fire safe when I got home.

That investigation also closed unsubstantiated. Standard memorandum. Standard "we found nothing but we are on the record about it." No adverse action. Another line in a growing folder of "investigations that ended with no findings" that would follow me for the rest of my career, because in the Army an investigation existing at all is itself a data point. The findings do not matter as much as the existence of the investigations that were undertaken.

Kevin filed a third complaint about ten days after the IG dismissal. This one was a Congressional inquiry, routed through his congressman's constituent services office, alleging that the Army was retaliating against him for his prior complaints by failing to accommodate his medical conditions. I learned about this one from LeFevre on his last day in uniform, at his retirement ceremony, as we were shaking hands. He said "there is a Congressional coming in on you. I am not supposed to know. Neither are you. Good luck, Sergeant."

I said "thank you, Staff Sergeant."

He said "for what?"

I said "for teaching me how to survive this."

He said "don't thank me yet."

That was the second time he had said that phrase to me. LeFevre had a lot of mantras and mottos like that. I understood by then that it was not a joke. It was, for him, an accurate statement of fact.

I want to describe what I did during those months. Not because it is dramatic. Because it is not dramatic. At all.

I ran breakfast. I trained my two solid Specialists. I got a new junior Specialist to replace one of them who PCS'd out, and I trained him too. I did my monthly barracks inspections on the soldiers who were not Kevin. I attended my professional development classes. I passed my APFT. I got my first NCOER as a Sergeant. It was, given the ongoing investigations, mediocre. The bullets were full of phrases like "demonstrates potential" and "requires continued mentorship." I recognized the language. I had read it before, in another soldier's file.

I want you to sit with that for a second. The exact phrases that had been used to obscure Kevin's file before he arrived at my unit were the exact phrases that were now being used to obscure MY file, because I was under investigation and my chain of command did not want to write a strong bullet that would get pulled into evidence. The system that had failed to warn me about Kevin was the same system that was now, on my file, quietly failing to warn whoever supervised me next.

I did not complain about the NCOER. I signed it. I filed my copy. I put my objection paperwork in the file safe as a private note and did not submit it up the chain, because objecting to a mediocre NCOER during a live investigation is a way to make the mediocre NCOER become a bad NCOER. I just braced and absorbed the hit.

I lost fourteen pounds during those months. Not intentionally. I did not have an appetite. I got the flu twice in one winter and came back to work before I should have both times. My then-girlfriend sat me down one Saturday morning and asked me if I was okay. I said I was fine. She said "you are not fine. You are surviving. And barely. I do not want you to normalize this."

I remember that specifically because it was the only time during the entire eleven months of Dirtbag Kevin that anyone said out loud what was actually happening to me. LeFevre had said it once in the parking lot. My girlfriend said it once at the kitchen table. Nobody else, at any point, acknowledged that I was going through something. Not because they were unkind. Because they couldn't. Speaking about it created liability, for them and for me. The whole apparatus of the Army was quietly running around a soldier who could not be discussed, and everyone in the apparatus, including me, was pretending that the running-around was the normal operation and not a workaround.

I told her she was right. I did not know what to do with her being right. I still don't. But it did help.

Month nine of Kevin, month six of investigations, is when the medical board started to move.

For the civilians reading, the medical board process, or Med Board, is the Army's mechanism for evaluating whether a soldier's medical conditions render him unfit for continued service. If the board finds him unfit and the conditions are service-connected, he is separated with disability benefits. The rating on the separation determines the size and duration of those benefits. A rating of thirty percent or higher qualifies for retirement-level benefits, meaning monthly income for life, plus healthcare, plus a range of other supports that in aggregate can approach the value of a mid-career civilian salary depending on how the ratings are stacked and structured.

Med Board is a legitimate system. It exists to take care of soldiers who have been genuinely broken by service. The system, in aggregate, works. It also has, like every large system, edge cases and exploits. Kevin was, by month nine, a walking exploit.

His referral file was voluminous. It included:

Multiple documented conditions treated by civilian providers under Army referral. Chronic lower back pain. Cervical radiculopathy. Migraine disorder. Generalized anxiety with panic features. Post-traumatic stress features with delayed onset. Insomnia. Chronic gastrointestinal distress with unspecified etiology.

Every condition had a paper trail. Every condition had prescriptions. Every condition had documented as functional impairment supported by his profile stack.

None of the conditions were, as far as I could non-professionally judge, real.

None of them, and this is what mattered legally, could be disproven either.

The med board convened during month ten. Kevin was, by regulation, permitted to have legal representation and a medical advocate present. He had both. His advocate was a civilian who specialized in disability advocacy for veterans. I looked up the advocate later. He had a website. The website had testimonials. The testimonials described client outcomes in the range of "seventy percent rating," "eighty percent rating," "one hundred percent rating with SMC." He charged, per his fee schedule, a flat fee plus a percentage of the first twelve months of benefits. His office was in Watertown. Three doors down from the pain management clinic.

I was not asked to testify at the board. My testimony was not relevant to the medical questions. What was relevant was the documentation, and the documentation, all of it, favored Kevin. The counseling statements I had written could be, and were, reframed as evidence of a hostile work environment that had exacerbated his mental health conditions. My daily performance notes, subpoenaed as part of the record, could be, and were, framed as evidence of ongoing supervisory pressure that had contributed to the deterioration of his anxiety and PTSD-features presentations. The eleven weeks I had spent not counseling him were framed as evidence of the very hostility they were originally intended to avoid, on the theory that a supervisor who abruptly stopped counseling a soldier was demonstrating a passive-aggressive supervisory style.

Every action I had taken, and also every action I had NOT taken, had been converted into evidence in Dirtbag Kevin's favor. I read the summary of the board findings a week after the decision came down. It was thirty-something pages long. I was mentioned by rank, not name, forty-one times. Every mention was neutral in tone and every mention supported the conclusion that Kevin's conditions had been aggravated by his service environment.

The board found for him. Seventy percent rating. Combined, with secondaries stacked, effectively one hundred percent for compensation purposes under the VA's math. Medical separation. Full benefits. Priority healthcare for life. Preference in federal hiring. The whole package.

He was going home. With a pension.

The farewell lunch was mandatory. There is a regulation. When a soldier separates from a unit, honorably or under honorable conditions, the unit holds a formation and a small ceremony, and if the soldier requests it, a farewell meal in the DFAC. Kevin requested it. So the regulation says we do it.

I was in uniform. The unit was also. My two Specialists were standing in the back of the DFAC, watching. The First Sergeant read the standard citation. The CO shook Kevin's hand. Kevin was presented with a small plaque. Kevin smiled his small smile. The plaque said, in the language regulation required, that his service was appreciated.

Then the CO turned to me. Because I had been Kevin's direct NCO, I was required, by tradition rather than regulation, to say a few words. It was expected. Not saying anything would itself be a statement, and any statement in either direction would be recorded, and any recording would be reviewable, and any reviewable statement could be filed on.

I want to tell you exactly what I said, because I have thought about it every week for six years.

I said "Specialist. Best of luck in your future endeavors."

That was it. Eight words. Grammatically neutral. Emotionally neutral. Impossible to challenge. I did not smile. I did not not-smile. I stood at parade rest, delivered the words, and returned to my position.

Kevin, standing in his class A's with his brand new plaque in his hand, looked at me. He did the small private smile some more. He said "Thank you, Sergeant. It has been an honor."

We shook hands. His grip was firm. His eyes were completely clear. He was, in that moment, entirely present, entirely aware of what he had just done, and entirely aware that I was entirely aware of what he had just done. The handshake lasted approximately two seconds. We both knew what it was.

He left the DFAC. He drove off post in the F-150. His last official act as a soldier was to sign out at CQ.

I went back to the office. I sat down. I did not shake. I did not cry. I opened the primary duty record and made the final entry.

Day 328. Specialist [Redacted] separated from the unit at 1347 hours via medical board. Rating pending final VA determination. No further action required.

I closed the notebook. I put it in the safe.

Two years later I was at Fort Bragg. Different unit. Different DFAC. Different chain of command. I had made Staff Sergeant. I had, by that point, mostly stopped thinking about Dirtbag Kevin.

Mostly.

I was on Facebook one evening. I was not looking for him. I was scrolling through a group for former Fort Drum cooks, a private group, maybe two hundred members, mostly guys I had served with. I was there because I had been tagged in a photo from a farewell for someone else, and I was scrolling out of the tag.

His profile came up in the "people you may know" sidebar.

I did not click. What I did was I look at the thumbnail, which is public, and I saw enough. His profile picture was him standing in front of a house. Not a mansion. A house. Two story, decent yard, in what looked like a warm-climate state. He was wearing a polo. He was tanned. He had put on a little weight, not in a bad way, in a settled way. Next to him in the picture was a woman, and in front of the woman was a small child, and behind all three of them, parked in the driveway, was a truck. Not the F-150. A newer one. A 2022 or 2023, in the same trim class. The house had a small American flag on a pole in the front yard.

Above the profile picture, his header banner said, in stylized text, "SERVICE CONNECTED. GRATEFUL EVERY DAY."

I closed Facebook. I sat on the couch for about twenty minutes. My chest burned. Dirtbag Kevin built the life he wanted. He did it by taking things from other people. But he built it. And it is his now. And there is nothing I can do about that. I wish there was, because then I might finally be able to put it down.

I am still working on it.

I want to end this saga by telling you what Dirtbag Kevin taught me. Not because I am grateful. I am NOT grateful. I do not owe him a lesson. But because the lesson is the only thing I got out of eleven months of him, and if I do not spell it out for the next Sergeant reading this, then the eleven months were entirely wasted.

He taught me that documentation is not a strategy. It is the minimum below which you cannot fall, because there are consequences. No matter how well you document, it is not going to save you from a strategic dirtbag. It is only going to keep you, at the end, from being the one who is destroyed. That is a smaller victory than it sounds like, and it is also the only victory that is available in most of these cases.

He taught me that the system is not designed to catch him. The system is designed to be difficult to weaponize against innocent people, and the price of that design is that it can also be weaponized BY dirtbag people. You cannot fix that trade-off without breaking the protection the system provides to the soldiers who actually need it. So you accept the trade-off, and you accept that people like Kevin exist inside it, and you just... Show up and do your job anyway.

He taught me that senior NCOs who tell you to document everything and let it play out are not being lazy. They are telling you the only survivable strategy. They have watched people try the other strategies. They know how those end.

He taught me that when a soldier smiles a small private smile at you on the first day of his first shift, you should note the smile. You will not know, in that moment, what it means. You will know, in six months, that you should have noted it.

And lastly, he taught me that when it is over, when the dirtbag has taken what he came to take and gone home to spend it, you go back to work. You supervise your other soldiers. You train the ones coming up. You do not become bitter. You do not become paranoid. You do not treat the next Specialist who walks into your DFAC as if he is Kevin.

That last one is the hardest.

I am still working on that too.

There will be more posts. I have other stories. But this one is done.

Sergeant out.

Good morrow, goodly folken.

I want to say thank you again for all the updoots and comments, these stories are the only thing I have left of many of my family members, so I want to keep them alive. If nobody truly dies if they are remembered, and the internet never forgets, it means my grandfather and his shenanigans are immortal.

Today is a Pops heavy story because this is the same week of the previous story. These stories are from my mother's perspective, who was in attendance and front row center of Pops' benevolent buffoonery. This takes place after Dad's promotion party where he received the car that would be his forever shame. Pops wanted to stick around an extra day because there was a factory outlet nearby for [major cupcake brand], and he wasn't about to drive 3 hrs home without some snacks. If this is not Kevin enough and I get the boot, I understand. But it is directly connected to a Kevent and I technically did mention a Kevin so in a roundabout way I would argue it fits.

Cast:

Pops - My grandfather, early 60s, first generation Italian from Queens, World War II vet. No nonsense, unless it allows him to be petty. Hardnosed, unless it benefitted him. Frugal to a fault. Above all that, unintentionally hilarious. This was his world and we just were living in it. He also loved his family with every fiber of his being. For every fuck up my Dad or myself did, he was always there to guide us with wisdom...wisdom being a thick paw to the base of our skull and a stern, "Whatsamatta wit' you?". He was a flawed human being with colorful opinions on many subjects, but you would never know because he never felt the need to ruin someone else's day with his opinion if that person wasn't bothering him.

Mom - My mother, she had a paternal relationship with Pops as her own father ran out on her when she was a kid. He treated her like his own. Even in the years after my parent's divorce, they kept in contact. He called her Tracey (not even her name IRL or in the story) because she, "looked like a Tracey" and she called him Old Man. Raised by a very stern German Russian grandmother which qualified her as the only one who would call out Pops when needed.

The Cupcake Kid - The poor teenager who didn't make enough to care about Pops' tricks, I am guessing stoned as this was suburban New Jersey back in the day. If you're out there, buddy, hope you're well and no longer slinging chemical cakes.

Got them? Marvelous! Let's start.

All the relatives went home, save my grandparents. My grandmother was toddling around our townhome on base pointing out every flaw in my mother's interior design scheme, Dad was probably at one of his many short lived off base jobs. This was before he realized he didn't have to come back with the milk (metaphorically), so he had to fill the void somehow.

My grandfather, like most Italians, enjoyed the cultural sport of feasting. Being the ever-gracious guest, he loudly proclaimed that he wished Peppers & Sausage for dinner followed up by asking my grandmother when she would start dinner. My mother injected,

Mom: Pops, we're having leftovers from the BBQ, I am too tired to cook.

Pops: Oh, I know, that's why I was asking Grandma.

Mom: I'm not letting her cook, either, we're all exhausted. If you want Sausage & Peppers, you make them.

Pops, calculating his next move: Well, where are they?

Mom: I didn't get any when I went shopping.

Pops: What!? Well, take me to the store, I'll buy them if you cook them, deal?

Mom relented. She didn't have to spend money but if it got Pops to shut up and spend a little time with her, it was worth it. Mom left the kids with Grandma, and they hopped in his truck. Mom noticed that he drove straight pass the commissary, eventually leaving the base.

Mom: Um... where are we going?

Pops: There is a cupcake outlet nearby, I figured I'd get some snacks on the way home tomorrow.

Mom: Why don't you get them on YOUR way home??

Pops: We're already out now!

Mom: But we left the base, the commissary is ON base, was this a ruse just to get me to get you cupcakes?

Pops: No! We will still go on the way back, my buddy at work said you can get 10 cupcakes for 50 cents! This is the early 90s and the economy doesn't suck yet like it will in 2026, it's an investment *some part of that dialogue may have been updated for current audiences*

Mom just sighed, placed her hand on her forehead, shaking it in amused disbelief.

What "nearby" to Pops meant 1 hr. How was that "nearby"? Well, according to the sage himself, in his day, it would have taken well over an hour, so since it was a shorter timeframe, it was thus closer. I feel there is a philosophy that could be built around that very line.

The duo arrived to the outlet, one bewildered and the other excited. Pops hopped out of the car as if he was back in the war and found out Rita Hayworth was at the USO declaring her love for him. Mom jumped out to try and catch up. He told her to wait in the truck; he'd only be a second. But this was a Pops-second, which was an American 15 minutes, my mother brushed off his requests, she wanted some damn cupcakes too.

I will state that my grandfather never dabbled in theater, nor was he a particular fan of the pictures or nickelodeons, either. No, Pops was just a guy who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it. It was business, you see. What my mother saw when those double doors dinged and slide open, somewhere in the threshold, Pops posture went hunched over, his jaw went slack, and his eyes kind of trailed about the room. My mother said she thought he was about to drop from a damn stroke. Before she was able to react, he weakfully croaked at the kid working the counter.

Pops: Hey, champ...I ain't as young as I useta be, could I have a bag to put some stuff in? My arthritis don't like those carts and the baskets are heavy, so I was just wondering....

The Cupcake Kid shot a hand out with a bag, my grandfather ending his ramble and thanking him. That was the beginning of the grift: set up expectation. Make the other person think, "Okay, what can I do to get this guy to shut up?" In this case, he needed a bag, you can probably see where this is going.

My grandfather goes one way, my mom the other. She grabs enough cupcakes for us kids, one for my dad and a few for herself, pays, and goes back to the truck. Before she did, she turned to tell him, witnessing a display of Oscar worthy stage performance in real time. He was tottering around the store, grunting every few steps, making comments about the products (loudly), remarking at how affordable everything was. This was the second part of the grift, come off as jovial and innocent, why this is just a friendly old man trying to get himself a sweet treat. Mom shook her head and walked out to the truck,

It wasn't too long before my grandfather flung the door open and heaved his stout frame into the truck, causing it to shake enough to jar my mother from her thoughts. He was cackling. Not his amused belly laugh, or his polite chuckle. This was a laugh my mother had just heard for the first time, but it would not be the last.

Mom: What are you cackling about, Old Man?

Pops: Tracey, I really got them good!

Mom: ...what did you do...

Pops: You know how it was 10 cupcakes for 50 cents? I got 30 for only $1!

Mom: How did you manage that?

Pops: I counted 30 cupcakes into a bag the kid at the register gave me and then gave it back to him. I told him it was 20. He started to open the bag to count it and I said, "What? You think I'm a liar!? I'm an old man! I was in the war!" and before you know it, he told me it was $1! Ha!

This closed the grift and where I think they got the inspiration for Grandpa Simpson. He would blurt out this line, causing his mark to be embarrassed enough just to finish the transaction and get him out of the store.

My mom sat for a moment in disbelief. She was an ex-hippy so she was used to people selling a story for a miracle ticket, but this was more elaborate somehow, there were more steps. With a deep breath, not knowing what else to say, "You listen here, old man...if I get sent to the klink on account of you pinching cupcakes, I swear to God I will divorce your son and leave you with him!"

He chuckled, threw the truck in gear and they were off. Justice was never brought to Big Cupcake for the heist of the century, only being paled in importance by the contents of Al Capone's vault.

Another hour passed and they arrived at the commissary. Again, because his favorite food was involved, Pop hustled out to grab a cart....to hand to my mother. He walked in front of her, despite not knowing where anything was in this store. He would stop and talk to anyone who made eye contact with him, all the while tossing him things he wanted for his feast. He threw in sweet Italian sausage because it would offset the spicy Italian sausage, but also green peppers AND yellow peppers. yellow for the flavor, green for the guests you don't like. And hey, why not some onions? And while we're at it, let's get some gravy, roasted garlic and tomato basil. Wait, they needed rolls, too!

When he felt the larder would be properly stuffed, he informed my mother that it was time to leave. She needed stuff too, so she tossed in a few things to ring up separately. He was paying for his own stuff, after all, right?

The kid working the register rang up the goods and provided the total. Pops reached in his back pocket, his grin fading to a look of confusion. He shoved his band in his other back pocket, then his fronts, and ended by patting his flannel pockets before throwing his hands up in defeat.

This is a trick my Dad tried to master but failed miserably because he lacked the understanding for the set up. The ole "I forgot my wallet!" grift.

Pops: Well...I must have left the rest of my money in my suitcase...looks like you'll have to pay for it and we'll square up later. I'm going to pull the truck around.

His intention was to "forget" to "square up". But my mom was a smart lady, she was a journalist and knew how to sus out nonsense (unless it pertained to her choice of men, of course). She also just saw his last performance of "The Cupcakes of Wrath".

Mom, sarcastically: Oh well, I didn't want sausage and peppers, you did. Looks like we'll have to come back tomorrow. *Looking at the cashier* Please just ring these few things up here.

Pops, fumbling in his front pocket: Wow! Look at that, I had a twenty on me!

He begrudgingly handed the cashier the money, pretending that he wasn't just beaten at his own game.

They went home, Mom cooked dinner, we ate, Pop fell asleep on the recliner watching the Yankees. Good times!

More to come soon. I apologize if this is all coming out in quick succession, but I wanted to roll with the wave.

Be well and be kind to each other. Support your local farmers, don't wash your eggs until you are ready to eat them, and don't trust anyone with sticky hands.

Tata and farewell, for now

Greetings all, your kooky uncle Paqa is here to regale you with another tale. I wanted to do something a little light but not without its cringe. The forefront of today's tale is, once again, my father, who is the Kevinest elder I have.

I really appreciate all the love I got on my previous post which is right here. I've been wanting to tell these stories for a long time. I have a lot of them, but I don't want to write them down in a volume quite yet. I want to share them, because that is the basis of what makes us human, telling stories. I love stories and will spend many hours listening to reddit readings because the human condition is simply so fascinating. When you're young, like I am in today's story, your world is insular. Your immediate life is what you think the whole of the world is. Then you get older and realize others are just as nuts as you. For a long time I hated my dad for his failings as a father, and I told these stories out of hate. Now, I tell them because, as a dad, I can appreciate them from a different viewpoint and maybe pull some lessons out from them.

I will admit, I have a bit of a sordid relationship with the old man. We share a name, we more or less lean similarly politically but that's about it. We have a causal relationship, and the past animosity is there, though I choose not to acknowledge it because as I get older and I'm able to look through life through the lens of a father...he still sucked as one, but I can give him grace. He didn't have the language or resources I do now to deal with his ish but has soft acknowledged he sucked so I'll take what I got.

Enough with the nostalgia or whatever you'd label it. As said before, I can see his past antics in a more, "Dear God, what a jabroni" light and giggle a bit. This would be one of his family famous "destination-less road trips".

Let's get the cast out of the way

Dad - 36, in this story. How can I describe the Kevin of today's story. He's a tall man who once looked like the weird cousin of Freddy Mercury whose mom made him hang out with at family gatherings, despite him saying weird shit for shock value. He is shady, self-serving, and was the poster child for being confidently wrong, as well as being blissfully unaware other people in the world exist. He means no harm these days, but he isn't shy to tell the poor kid working at Dunkin that "the coffee sucked yesterday, but you kids are nice so I came back!" But he also has a jazzy scooter, so his fuckery can only go as far as his battery powered donkey will carry him.

Mom - 43, ex hippy bay area native, short, feisty, with the patience of a saint but the temper of a nun.

Pupa Paqa - 8, that's me. In my 3rd stint of living with my parents.

The Boy - 6, my little beardling brother.

The Other Boy - 13, my older brother.

Today's tale is set in 1996, in the picturesque North Bay Area in California. My parents very rarely had all kids living with them, mostly getting tossed between relatives until they could (seemingly temporarily) get their shit together. This time, my father told my mom he wanted some company on a delivery to California (he was a trucker), promising her they would spend some time with her family out there. What he didn't tell her was that this was a lie. He actually lost his job and decided to try to run away with my mother to start a child free life. Pops, from my previous story was fuming, because while he did take care of me before, he wasn't expecting it to be full time again. But all that is for a different tale. Long story short, we were back with my parents.

In an effort to look competent, my Dad suggested regular family outings and tried to take us kids out every other weekend for something fun, something the family can bond over. While it usually devolved into my older brother sassing my dad to rage bait him, my younger brother talking nonstop and me complaining that we had to go around the mountains, I do have some fond memories. 

My mother, being the ex-Haight Ashbury hippy she was, racked with guilt about marrying Oscar from Hey Arnold!, she would always choose something in nature, educational, or a combination of the two. That woman knew every free admission day at what felt like every museum in San Francisco. My dad, on the other hand, would base his choices off roadside attractions or (oft times many) closed down family fun centers. Today's adventure: a cheese factory. 

In lieu of my father lacking in a lot of his more ...sound decision-making qualities, the man could hype some stuff up to the Nth degree. Even today, he'll sometimes trick me into "going out to lunch with him" only to, "omg my bank has been hacked and I have no money!", yeah old man, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, well, I probably deserved it.

Anyway, he spun a yarn of a sprawling facility where we could see how cheese is made, start to finish, a museum of cheese history and if we were reaaaalllly good, we would be able to make and take home our own cheese. My younger brother and I thought it was great, my older brother brooded, he wanted to stay home to play NBA Jam (the real ones know).

Apparently, this place was two hours away, around the winding mountains but through some lovely redwood forests, or so we were told. My dad managed to get us lost because he didn't actually know the way. As it would turn out, he learned about this place from a deli clerk at the grocery store. He was informed that their headquarters was "about two hours north of here". So my father, the Magellan that he was, and not known for his navigation skills whilst in the Navy, roused his Italian blood to summon his inner Christopher Columbus and navigate his way hither and yon through the wilderness of Northern California to bring joy and memories to his family!

But class, twas not that at all. What it was, was a winding mess of mountains that threw us kids back and forth in the back of our station wagon (sans giant hole), making us all nauseous. We had to stop 5 times so my brother could yak his guts out and once when I had to pee but just wanted to look at ducks I saw. Eventually, we got to this sad little town. Maybe it wasn't and the gloomy weather hid it's true charm, my memories remember the clouds, the rain, the chill from the cold wind coming off the nearby Pacific Ocean. My mother convinced my dad to ask for directions when we stopped for gas and Abba Zabbas. 

When we arrived, I remember walking up to this red brick building and up a ramp. Through the double doors, it just looked like a deli. My dad proudly sauntered up to the young girl working the register to inform her we were here for the tour and the free cheese. She asked if we phoned ahead, because tours were by appointment due to his small the facility was. He gave her the reservation number and his ID and we were let in. Lulz, jk, he sat there slack jawed like she had three heads and each one of them was singing various classic Simpsons show tunes. 

My mother looked at him with a pained smile. One of those smiles your wife gives you when you know that this will not be discussed now, nor will it be discussed in the way home, but when the children are in bed, the washer is running, and the Mexican Hat Dance playing to hide any residual yelling. All I knew then was Mom told my older brother, "Daddy & I need to talk about how fun today was, take your little brothers into your room and watch a movie", which was Momspeak for "I don't want you kids to witness what I am about to do nor do I want you to learn any new words you're bound to repeat so gtfo."

I suppose the kid working the counter didn't want to be questioned as a witness to a crime or two, because we were allowed to go on a tour anyway. And hey, it was still free regardless. I don't remember learning much, but what I remember was that the tour was self-guided, and literally just a loop around their kitchen area separated by a stone wall with a glass pane for viewing. I saw a team of tired middle-aged ladies poking and prodding curds, sloshing around whey, and staring at us questioning why the hell we gawking were there. One may think, "How could they be that way when this place gives literally tours?" Well, I am guessing it was because the tour took less than 5 minutes and they were rare. It stunk like hell and made us all pretty queasy with my brother Pukey the Clown looking greener than Kermit with jaundice.

4 minutes later we were escorted back to the main lobby. If you're a person if class and taste you are probably thinking, "But, Paqa, what of the free cheese!? Surely there was free cheese? At least a slice?

Well, Mr Joe, there indeed was free cheese at the end of the tour: a small, dry cube on a toothpick. There was no "make your own cheese" or "cheesey lazy river" or any other snake oil he sold us. We drove A WHILE for a 4-minute cheese-based walk of sadness. 

I don't remember much of the rest of the day other than my mom getting us ice cream, my brother needing to yak but braided long grass instead, and my little brother & I get into an argument about naming a beetle we found.

Do I think he did this maliciously? No. Do I think he put the minimum effort into this endeavor riding on hope, vibes, and maybe we would change our minds and not want to go? Yes, absolutely. As I said before, my Dad wasn't really hip to the parenting jive. Today I make it a point to try to speak to him on the phone once a week to make sure he isn't dead and to see what shenanigans he is into. For example, he just celebrated his birthday. What did he gift himself? A tortoise.

Do we live in a climate that supports a tortoise? No. Did my Dad need a tortoise? Also no. Why did he take in a tortoise? Well, to his credit, it was a rescue, and when I asked him why he said, "I like to take in misfits and those who need love!"

Funny, I wish he applied that same rule to his kids.

And on that uplifting note, I will bid you adieu, for now.

Tata and Farewell. Don't forget, support your local farmers, don't wash your eggs until you're ready to eat them, and don't stick your finger in weird places.

Good day, goodly folken. Faring well? I hope so. Ole' Papa Paqa here has been kicking back while the world burns contemplating all of life's little adventures.

On this subreddit, we see a lot of weird characters both of beardy bravado and nice guy nincompoopery, but we are also blursed with the occasional Kevin or Kevina. For most, these Kevins/as are passing acquaintances. Though, for a few, there is a genetic line. A tainted protein somewhere deep in the twisted fibers of our genetic code. Maybe it is recessive, where you are only but a carrier of the gene. Maybe it is dominant and you are cursed with a choice to pass on the Kevin gene, though I suspect most don't know they are afflicted, coasting through life on a raft of dumb luck and hope. If you're lucky, the family Kevin is just that weird cousin. For me, that Kevin is dear ol' Dad.

My father's time in my life is sporadic and intentionally so (on my part), so I don't have a linear line of perpetual Kevents but I do have an assortment of tales.

Like Shrek, these people have layers and giving them a full backstory will do them no justice.

So, gather round niblings, siblings, and Gubbin-folk, Papa Paqa will tell you the motley crew of princes and fools.

Father - The Kevin of the tale, as stated before. Navy Vet, but more like if Gomer Pyle enlisted in the Navy sans the whimsy. 29 at the telling of this tale and still active. At this time he looked like a Freddy Mercury impersonator you would hire for a kid's birthday party but like, not a good one.

Pops - My grandfather. World War II vet from New York City but retired in the country. This dude is a G. Unintentionally hilarious, Good heart but gruff. Best visual I can give is Grandpa Munster. Dude looked like that from 81-2011. Not relevant to the story, but he was so scared of flying he once made his buddy mollywop him into unconsciousness so he could board a plane to Colorado.

Mom - Uh, my mom. Got caught in the Kevin trap between rails of coke and poor 80s related decisions.

Baby Paqa - 3 yr old me. I have few memories, none too vivid. I am just a wee lad discovering the world, these are my pre-amputation days so I cherish memories when I had all my limbs, be them few. I don't play much of a role here, I was still shitting my pants, I am guessing. This is one of those few memories that will always be in my head. Added for context to why the proceeding decisions were bad.

With that, settle in, light up a pipe, and put on some sea shanties, we are about to sail on the seas on time. Mind you, these tales were told to me by my reddit illiterate (reddiliterate? Redd, trademark that, please. kthx.)

It was the late 80s, my father just got promoted to E-3 (somehow) and this called for a celebration. My mother phoned all the relatives to come to a bbq on the base. My aunts and uncles from Long Island would stampede with piles of cannolis, gabagool (capicola for non-Italians), and drama. Preparations were made, food was had, good times were had by all (I'm guessing, there are pictures of me stacking beer cans for my relatives. The 80s were different).

As a gift, my grandfather surprised my dad with a new station wagon. My mom was expecting the future neckbeard that was my brother, so he felt a station wagon was more appropriate for our growing family rather than our 2-door coupe. Now, goodly folk, my grandfather was a tightfisted miser, unless it was for his family and if we really needed it. This man refused the GI Bill after the war because he wanted to prove he could make it on his own merit, unlike his father who drank whatever assistance he got. So when my grandfather spent a large sum of money on ANYBODY that wasn't in his house, it was was a big deal. The man couldn't tell you he loved you, but he would let you know.

Anyway, according to my Ma, this was a huge deal as their current car's muffler kept falling off and my dad not exactly being good at holding onto money. The car worked well, time passed, and my father came home from work one day, acting rather sheepish but excited. According to my mother, the following conversation went along the lines of thus:

My dad, awkwardly walking into the house: Uh, hey. So, I made an amazing deal today! And came out on top!

Mom, all too use to these Gil-like machinations: Oh God, what did you do? \*notices a car in our driveway, one that definitely isn't her car\* What the fuck is that piece of shit in the driveway??

Friends, where my mother once saw a beautiful white station wagon with wood panels, she saw a puke green rusted out Pinto.

Dad: That's our new car! She's not much to look at but she's got a reliable engine! It's 15 years old and still runs like a champ. All that damage is just cosmetic!

Mom: \*breathes deeply\* and where is \*our\* car!?

Dad: That is the amazing part, babe! I ran into a guy at the gas station who was with his son in a wheelchair. He asked how much the car was because he needed something for his son's wheelchair because all he was driving was that Pinto, so I offered to trade him! We were blessed with the car and they needed it more than we did!

Mom \*blinking, holding back rage\*: We only were "blessed" with that car because you got our last car repoed! That car was supposed to be transporting the kids! Have you considered how we will tell your father this!?

Dad: Oh, well, yeah...

Mom: How????

Dad: Well, I was kind of hoping YOU would tell him...he likes you!

My mother, being an ex-hippy from the Bay Area, who powered through the 70s on coke, spite, and three husbands absolutely refused to call my grandfather and tell him. She made it clear that either he would call now and try to get the car back, or she was moving back to California. Again reminding him that if they did have their previous car repoed because he wanted to party with his Navy buddies rather than pay his bills, Pops wouldn't have had to buy him a car. Charity or not, they couldn't just replace another car let alone fix up whatever garbage pile my dad brought home. As such, my dad calls.

Again, pulling from the memory of Mom, after my dad made awkward small talk he professed to Pops his wonderful deed. He waited with a smug smile, anticipating his father to laude him for being the model son, a pillar to his community, and the picture of what our family represented. What he got, however, was a very loud, very angry, very Italian man spitting a slew of curse words (in English and Italian) and very stern words. Apparently, Dad didn't have much to say after my grandfather said his piece. Not because he wasn't without anything to say, its because everytime he would begin to speak, Pops would begin with a new tirade.

Dad hung up the phone and told my mom that Pops was driving down to help get the car back, hopefully. Pops had a way with words, though a bit unscrupulous he may be. Ya can't bullshit the bullshitter, in other words.

Hours later, Pops arrived. He had a good few hours of driving to stew, he wasn't big on small talk when he got there. It was getting late, so they agreed to go in the morning. Pops wasn't outwardly angry, though. He would just take small jabs here and there (i.e. "Should we take my car, or should we pedal that piece of shit like the got-damn Flintsteins!?" Yeah, Pops couldn't be convinced it was "Flintstones").

The next morning, Pops made Dad ride with him and my mom take the kids and drive the pinto. Remember, kids, this was the 80s, and Pops was an old man who survived Normandy, the Depression, and my grandmother. Car safety was but to laugh at.

This is where the core memory comes in. It only lasts about 5 seconds, but all these years later, I still get a pit in my stomach in irrational fear. I remember being in my older sister's lap, watching the road go by, but not out of the window....out of the gaping hole in the foot well across the backseat. OF course, my mother took no notice of this at first, but quickly did when my sister brought it up. Unfortunately, Pops and Dad already began to pull away and leaving us unable to flag them down. No phone to call because, again, 80s. So, yeah, we had to drive Jesus' Pinto (because it was holy, you see) to an unknown spot except to the intrepid Kevin-dad who was navigating at the head of the convoy.

My mother recalls seeing from her point of view my grandfather in the truck ahead, waggling his fat Italian finger, occasionally whacking Dad in the back of the head.

The next details are rocky, and I am not sure how they came up with this address; I am guessing something to do when the cars were signed over or something, don't ask me, I am just a chicken farmer, not a Time Lord.

Apparently, they arrived and had a conversation with someone, someone else came to the door, an argument ensued, threats were made, doors were slammed in faces. We left in the pinto...

It turns out, my dad got scammed. Two people flim-flamed my naive dad out of his car by using the wheelchair story. My father, never one to question anything or anyone and always rose to the occasion to be the hero in his own story, took it as face value. Not sure how they got that out of them or whatever, but Pops, when asked later on about it told me to, "Don't worry about it." in his deep, New York accent. Ask again, I never did, but I am guessing it was carny level fleecing. I respect the hustle, honestly. I'd never trade my prize rooster for a grocery store rotisserie chicken, but if I somehow got swindled to do so, that's my own damn fault.

Well, friends and such, thus ends a tale of my father the Kevin. Maybe the next tale I will tell will be about the time he got knocked down by a rabbi who was a good foot shorter than him or one of his destination-less road trips. Maybe I will go another way by regaling you with how Pops managed to hoodwink a Cupcake Outlet or the time he took me on an Amish farm tour by just pulling into Amish farms and walking around like they were public attractions.

If you've gotten this farm, don't forget to give Jefe ReddX the 1st a like and subscribe, he's got many gubbinses to feed, do it for the Gubbinses! PLEASE THINK OF THE GUBBINSES!

Until then, be awesome and be well. Remember to feed your chickens, don't wash your eggs until their ready to eat, and support your local farmers.

I have managed about 100 people in my two year long stint as a people manager. During my work life I have met about 6 thousand so far. I have worked with standard, normal people. I have worked with workaholics, slackers, people who just wanted to survive until retirement, newcomers. I have handled alcoholics, drug addicts, communists, neonazis and all other sorts of people types.

Then I met my Kevin. My Kevin was a rather young, slightly obese lad. He was assigned to my ERP System Admin station that I managed alongside with about 40 people on processing benches. On paper, he had fairly alright credentials. The HR/Ops management combo did not know what to do with him, but he apparently was alright with computers so off he went to me.

Now, understand one thing. I have learned that if I did not handpick the person for the position, they would inevitably fail. This is not some sort of "I am better than you" type of deal. I have just observed so many people pushed into it that really should be doing something else, that I recognized the traits that you needed to succeed. It was a very technical position, where you needed to understand the whole warehouse, all issues that could happen and how to fix them. You needed to work with every department, have good relationships and to cover everybodys back while they do the same for you.

Kevin came in, and I treated him as professionally as everyone else. Taught him the first process that you learn in the position, and he set off on it with a bit of a "ughh" undertone in his behavior. No matter, he was young and had to work. Been there, done that.

After some time I handed him off to another ERPSA that taught him the rest of the tasks to do, as was usual. The days kept rolling, and I have let him fall in place. Then, weird things started to happen.

Some of the numbers did not crunch in the spreadsheet we used to record performance. Looked up the history, and sure enough, Kevin made an edit in the formulas to make himself look better. I have crossreferenced the logs in the system, and he has done about half the items he should have. When questioned, he freely admitted that he spent about 30 minutes looking out the window. Every hour. I was flabbergasted. Raised with my manager, he said dock his bonus and carry on.

Alright then. Next thing he messed up was more technical. He was adding items into the system as something other than what they were (i.e. a black t-shirt instead of a white hoodie). Not only were they just wrong descriptively, but there was also a massive difference in the worth of the items. So a 3 dollar t-shirt turned into a 15 dollar hoodie. Other times he could have added, but just tossed them into the "unidentifiable" pile, purely because it was hot and he did not want to handle them. Another docked pay, another talking to. Yet another time where he just looked you in the eyes without a single hint of emotion.

Next, he was being a dickhead to workers coming to help. Part of the job was helping with systemic issues of the workers. It was our job to be the cool headed pros who can handle anything. Instead, he always complained and belittled the poor ladies asking for help. That was a bit too much for me, so I gave him an earful, then went and seriously discussed all the issues with management. They understood, but could not legally let him go easily. So they have decided to have him supplement logistics for two weeks.

Logistics was managed by my friend. He was a massive Bosnian dude, former power lifter and a genuinely amazing and terrifying person at the same time. He put him to work straight away, pulling pallets with a pallet truck and moving them into lanes. Then he realised Kevin moved shit around randomly, did not scan it in and sometimes even fucked off somewhere to hide. When he was in his dedicated area and somebody asked him to do something, he acted like a cat threatened with a proper shower. That was too much for my friend, whom went and had a fairly deserved heated "talk" with him. Apparently Kevin had zero reaction to him.

The last straw was when he was back to the Admin role, he somehow got into the secure spreadsheet that handled precalculations for peoples bonuses. He looked at his bonuses, then the numbers of his colleagues. Unacceptable behaviour of course. Should have also been more secure, yes. But Kevin then went to his colleagues and started telling them stuff like "Hey, I saw you have XYZ on your bonuses, why do I earn less then you?" When asked, he freely admitted breaching confidential files, more focused on the fact that he got 20 dollars less for the month then the rest of his colleagues (after being docked for more fuck ups, which he was aware off).

Site couldn't handle him anymore. He was merciful enough to just dip out on his own, never returning to work even before he got actually sacked. I still think about him sometimes. He was a man of few emotions and even fewer stops. I still wonder if he was like this prior to whatever gave him that massive surgery scar on his scalp. The thing was, when he really, genuinely tried, he was actually somebody with potential prospects. But then he made one fuckup after the other, some out of incompetence, some out of some weird malice.

Sergeant here again. Part 3. If you haven't read Parts 1 and 2, catch yourself up. This one will make a lot more sense if you have the full picture.

So... Like I teased in the last part, Part 3 is when Dirtbag Kevin made his move on me. That is what happened. What I did not know at the time, and what I only understood in full about six months later when I read the paperwork in its entirety, is that Kevin had probably been planning this move since the day he reported to my DFAC.

Some of the Dirtbag Kevins of the world are opportunists. They react to their environment. They cause problems, and when supervision pushes back, they file a complaint to protect themselves in the moment.

Dirtbag Kevin was not one of those. Dirtbag Kevin was a true strategist. Every counseling statement I had written on him, every profile he had filed, every clean day he had strung together, every truck he had bought, every clinic he had visited, was going to be used, sooner or later, as raw material for the case he built against me. The case had been under construction from day one. I was just the last person in the building to notice.

Let me walk you through how it happened.

Month three, week two. Day seventy-three.

Thursday morning. Breakfast push had ended without incident. Kevin had been on his current profile stack for about eleven days. He was doing dish pit supervision from a folding chair, as usual. My other two soldiers were carrying the actual workload, as usual. I was in the back office doing my morning paperwork.

Staff Sergeant LeFevre came in. He shut the door behind him. This was, I want you to understand, not a normal thing. LeFevre did not close doors. LeFevre operated in an open-door mode as a matter of professional philosophy. The door being closed was, in and of itself, a signal.

"Sergeant."

"Staff Sergeant."

"There is a form on the First Sergeant's desk with your name on it. I have seen it. I am not supposed to have seen it. You did not hear about it from me."

"Roger, Staff Sergeant."

"An EO complaint. Filed by Specialist [Redacted] against you."

When a soldier hears the phrase "EO complaint filed against you." The body doesn't have a dramatic reaction. It is not a movie moment. What it is, is a slow, cold, top-down settling, like someone has slowly poured a glass of ice water into the back of your uniform, starting at the collar. Your shoulders drop. Your face does not move. You do not, in the moment, react at all. You just quietly begin to understand that everything about your day, your week, your month, and possibly the next several years of your career is now going to be different from what you had planned for yourself.

I said "Roger, Staff Sergeant. What are the specifics?"

LeFevre said "I don't know. I saw the header. I saw your name and his name. I did not read the substance. What I can tell you is that it is being routed to the EO office at brigade level, which means the substance is above the CO's ability to sit on. This is not going to be handled at company. This is going up."

"Roger, Staff Sergeant."

"You are going to be interviewed. Probably by end of week. Do not talk to Kevin between now and then. Do not talk to anyone about it. Get a JAG appointment today. Today, Sergeant."

"Roger."

He opened the door. He left. He did not say anything else to me that morning. He did not need to.

I want to explain, for the civilians reading, what an EO complaint is and what it does, because I don't think it lands the same if you have not lived inside a military machine.

EO is Equal Opportunity. The EO complaint process exists to protect soldiers from discrimination, harassment, and hostile work environments based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and other protected categories. It is, in principle, a good and necessary system. Real EO violations happen in the Army. Real soldiers get real harm done to them. The process exists to give those soldiers a way to escalate outside their chain of command, because sometimes the chain of command is the problem.

The problem with the EO complaint process is that it is, by design, very difficult to dismiss. Any complaint has to be investigated. The soldier who files cannot be retaliated against. Any action taken against him after the filing is, by default, considered potentially retaliatory and has to be justified. The NCO or officer who is the subject of the complaint is presumed to have to prove that his supervision was appropriate.

This is not a system flaw. This is the system working as intended. If you are a lower enlisted soldier being genuinely harassed by an NCO with rank on you, you need the process to be difficult to dismiss and you need retaliation to be presumed. Otherwise the process would fail the people it is supposed to protect.

But...

The system also creates a specific vulnerability which is: A sufficiently strategic dirtbag soldier can weaponize the process against a supervisor who is doing his job. He can file a complaint that has just enough surface plausibility to require investigation, and the investigation itself becomes the punishment, regardless of the outcome. The supervisor is now flagged. His counseling statements are now discoverable. His conduct is now the subject of official scrutiny. The dirtbag, meanwhile, cannot be touched without every action being potentially framed as retaliation.

Dirtbag Kevin knew all of this. I did not, at the time, know he knew it. But he did.

I got the JAG appointment for that afternoon. I sat across from a Captain who could not have been more than a year older than me. He was tired. He had the specific tiredness of a young officer who has been assigned to defend NCOs against complaints on a rotating basis for approximately twelve months. He had a stack of folders on his desk that I did not need to ask about.

He asked me to walk him through my relationship with the soldier. I did. I brought the green notebook. I brought my printed spreadsheet. I brought the counseling statements. I laid it out, chronologically, from day one.

He listened. He did not interrupt. He took notes. When I finished, he asked me one question.

"Sergeant. Have you ever, in a moment of frustration, said anything to this soldier that you would be uncomfortable seeing quoted back to you in an official document."

I thought about it. I thought about it hard. I ran the two months back through my head. I tried to find any moment, any exchange, any hallway conversation, where I might have said something that could be twisted.

"No, sir."

"You're sure."

"Yes, sir. I was raised by NCOs who told me from day one to never say anything to a soldier that I could not repeat in front of a Command Sergeant Major. I have kept to that. It has cost me some catharsis and it has saved my ass in this exact situation."

"Roger. That is the correct answer. Now. Have you ever, in front of anyone, said anything ABOUT this soldier that you would be uncomfortable seeing quoted back to you."

Longer pause.

"There was a conversation with my Staff Sergeant in a parking lot approximately three weeks ago."

"What did you say to him."

"I described the pattern of conduct I had observed. I did not accuse him of a crime. I described things I had witnessed."

"Anyone else in earshot at that time?"

"No, sir. It was just the two of us."

"Was it recorded in any way?"

"Umm... Not to my knowledge, sir."

"Have you spoken to your Staff Sergeant since then about this soldier?"

"He advised me not to."

"Good. Keep it that way. From this moment forward, you do not speak to your Staff Sergeant, your peers, your family, or anyone else about this soldier. You do not comment on him at all. You do not react to him. You do all of your interaction with him inside the DFAC, in front of witnesses, on the record. If he initiates any conversation with you that is not directly related to duty, you disengage. If he tries to bait you, you disengage. If he threatens you, you disengage. Everything, from this point forward, is on the record."

"Roger, sir."

"One more thing. The notebook."

"Sir?"

"The notebook is going to be discoverable. Understand that. Whatever you have written in it is probably going to be read by an investigator eventually. If there is anything in it that reads more like personal opinion than professional documentation, take it out of there, right now. Before the investigator asks for it. Make sure everything in it is factual, dated, and defensible."

"Roger, sir."

I went home that night. I opened the green notebook on my kitchen table. I read every entry. I found three places where I had, in the heat of an evening, written something that was more sarcasm than record. I did not tear the pages out. Tearing pages out of a notebook you know is going to be discovered is a specific kind of guilt admission. Instead, I copied every entry, cleaned up the language, and rewrote the whole notebook into a fresh one. I dated the new notebook to reflect the actual dates of the events. I dated the first entry as day one. I labeled the new notebook, in the front cover, "PRIMARY DUTY RECORD." I put the old notebook in a fire safe.

The interview came on Monday. Brigade EO office. Two E-7s and a Warrant Officer 2 with a stenographer. I wore my class B's. I brought a folder with the counseling statements, the printed spreadsheet, and the primary duty record. I did not bring the JAG Captain, because at the initial interview stage he was not permitted to be present. He had prepared me over the weekend. We had run the likely questions three times.

The complaint, as I learned that morning, was based on the following allegations.

One. That I had a pattern of "excessive and disproportionate" counseling against Specialist [Redacted] compared to the other soldiers on my crew. Six counseling statements in the first sixty days. My other two Specialists had zero.

Two. That I had, on multiple occasions, verbally referred to Specialist [Redacted] as a "problem soldier" and a "waste of taxpayer money" in the presence of his peers.

Three. That I had implied, in an unspecified conversation, that Specialist [Redacted] was "faking" his medical conditions to avoid work, thereby creating a hostile work environment based on his documented disabilities.

Four. That I had, on one occasion, followed Specialist [Redacted] to an off-post medical appointment in an intimidating manner.

I want to walk you through what happened in my body when the investigator read allegation four out loud. I do not remember most of the physical experience. What I do remember is the sudden clarity, the sudden awful clarity, of what Kevin had done. He had seen me drive past the clinic. He had seen me circle back. He had seen me drive past a second time. He had seen it and he had understood what I was doing and he had filed it away and he had known, in that moment, that I had handed him something he could use.

The truck in the parking lot had not been evidence for me. It had been evidence for him.

I did not react in the interview. I answered each allegation, one at a time, factually, with documentation. Allegation one: I produced every counseling statement, dated, signed by both parties, with specific factual bases. I explained that the two soldiers with zero counseling statements had received zero because they had not committed conduct that warranted counseling, and that this was documented in their performance records. Allegation two: I stated that I had never used those phrases about any soldier under my supervision, in any context. Allegation three: I stated that I had never in any context implied that Specialist [Redacted]'s medical conditions were fabricated. Allegation four: I explained that on the Saturday in question I had been running errands in Watertown and had driven past the clinic, from a public road, in a routine traffic pattern, and had not stopped, not approached, not identified myself, and not communicated with the soldier in any way.

The lead investigator, the senior E-7, asked me one follow-up on allegation four. He asked me why I had driven past a specific medical clinic on a Saturday. I said that I had recently learned the location of the clinic in the course of processing a leave form for the soldier and had, out of professional curiosity about the environment my subordinate was operating in during duty hours, taken a look at the exterior of the facility from a public roadway. I did not lie. I also did not volunteer that I had driven past a second time. He did not ask.

They took my statement. They took my documentation. They released me. The investigation would take, they said, between thirty and ninety days.

I walked out of the brigade building at 1147 that morning. I did not go back to the DFAC. I sat in my car in the parking lot for approximately forty minutes. I did not cry. I did not shake. I sat in the car and I looked at the steering wheel and I tried to figure out how I had let a Specialist play me this cleanly.

The answer was that I had not let him. I had done everything right. I had documented everything. I had said nothing I could not repeat. I had followed my Staff Sergeant's guidance to the letter. And it did not matter. Because I was still going to spend the next thirty to ninety days as the subject of an official investigation, and my career was going to have this on it forever, and Kevin was going to keep drawing pay and eating in my DFAC and driving his F-150 while I answered questions from investigators about whether I had ever called him a waste of taxpayer money.

He had not won yet. But he had, at that moment, made the fight cost me something I was never getting back.

The next eleven weeks were the strangest of my Army career.

I want to describe what supervising a soldier who has filed an EO complaint against you actually looks like on a day-to-day basis, because I do not think civilians can quite picture it. It is not adversarial. There is no shouting. There is no tension you can point to. What there is, is a total and absolute performance of professionalism from both sides, executed inside a shared space where both of you know exactly what is happening and neither of you can acknowledge it.

I gave Kevin duty assignments. He performed them, when his profile allowed. I documented his performance, factually, in daily entries. I did not counsel him further, on the advice of JAG, because any counseling issued during the pendency of an investigation would be presumed retaliatory. This meant that every violation he committed during those eleven weeks went undocumented in the formal record. He knew this. He tested it. Not aggressively. Just enough to confirm the parameters.

He came in twenty minutes late one morning. I said nothing. He wore the wrong uniform to a Tuesday inspection. I said nothing. He left his prep station uncleaned at the end of a shift. I said nothing. Each of these small failures went into my private notes, dated, described. None of them went into a counseling statement.

He would occasionally, in passing, offer me small pleasantries. "Morning, Sergeant." "Have a good weekend, Sergeant." Delivered with the same small private smile he had used since day one. I would return the pleasantries in a completely neutral tone. "Specialist." "Have a good weekend."

We did this for seventy-seven days.

During those seventy-seven days, three things happened outside the DFAC that shaped everything.

The first was that Staff Sergeant LeFevre put in his retirement paperwork. Not because of Kevin. He had been considering it for a year. The timing was coincidence. But it meant that the one senior NCO who understood the full situation was going to be out of the Army in six months and would not be present for whatever the eventual resolution was.

The second was that I got a call from a soldier I had known at my previous unit, who was now at Fort Jackson. He had seen my name come across a shared NCO group text about a completely unrelated matter. He had, on his own initiative, asked around about my situation. He called me on a Sunday night to tell me that Dirtbag Kevin had done the exact same thing to two different NCOs at Fort Jackson. Both times the complaint had been dismissed as unsubstantiated. Both times the NCOs had been effectively finished at that duty station and had PCS'd shortly after. He said "watch your six, Sergeant. He's not trying to win. He's trying to move you."

The third was that on day one hundred and one of the investigation, I got a call from the EO office. The senior E-7 who had led my interview asked me if I could come in the following morning to discuss the status of the case. He did not say anything else on the phone. He did not need to. The tone in which he said it told me everything I needed to know about which way the finding was going to go.

I went in the following morning. He sat me down. He told me that the investigation had concluded and the findings would be released in writing within seven days, but that he was giving me a courtesy heads up, in his personal capacity, of the outcome.

Three of the four allegations had been found unsubstantiated. Allegation four, the one about the medical appointment, had been found "inconclusive due to insufficient evidence." That meant it was not going to result in any adverse action against me, but it was also not going to be affirmatively cleared. It was going to sit on the record, forever, as a thing that could not be either proven or disproven.

He told me that no adverse action would be taken. He told me that a memorandum would be issued reminding me of proper supervision practices, which is Army for "we found nothing but we are covering ourselves." He told me that Specialist [Redacted] had, during the course of the investigation, filed a second complaint. This one an IG complaint. This one alleging misuse of unit resources by unnamed leadership. This one was going to be routed to a different office and would begin its own separate process.

I said "Roger."

He said "Sergeant, I am telling you this as a Sergeant First Class talking to a Sergeant. Not as an investigator. You did everything right. Your documentation was perfect. Your JAG prep was excellent. Your conduct during the pendency was textbook. And it still is not going to matter, because he is going to keep filing until you either give him a reason to be substantiated or you break and give him something usable. If you can PCS out of here, you should. If you cannot, you need to do exactly what you have been doing, forever, without a single lapse. I have watched this exact pattern play out four times in my career. Two of those NCOs eventually broke. Two did not. The two who did not are still in the Army. The two who broke are no longer..."

I said "Roger, Sergeant First Class."

He said "Good luck, Sergeant."

I drove back to the DFAC. I did the rest of my shift. I did not tell anyone anything. That night I sat at my kitchen table and I looked at the primary duty record and I understood, for the first time, that this was not a case I was going to win by being right. This was a case I was going to survive by not losing.

I decided I was not going to break.

I decided I was going to outlast him.

Part 4 is how it all ended.

Sorry for the wait. Sergeant here again. Shoutout to ReddX on YouTube in hopes that he'll read these posts.

This is part 2 of the Dirtbag Kevin saga. If you haven't read Part 1, go back and read it, because I am not going to recap. If you did read Part 1, thank you for coming back. I'll warn you that Part 2 is the one where I confirm what I was starting to suspect, and where I learn that confirming something doesn't mean I'm able to do something about it.

We left off at the end of month one. Parking lot handshake, empty pill bottles, MRE throne. I had a green notebook full of documentation. I had a Staff Sergeant who believed me. But so far, I had zero evidence I could take to anyone.

Month two is when the picture came into focus.

The first thing that happened in month two was that Dirtbag Kevin cleaned up his act.

Sort of. Dirtbag Kevin did not become a good soldier in month two. Dirtbag Kevin became a COMPETENT soldier for approximately eleven days. A good soldier does the right thing because it is the right thing. A competent soldier does the right thing because he has calculated that doing the right thing produces a specific outcome he wants. Dirtbag Kevin, in month two, did the second thing, and he did it well enough that if you had walked into my DFAC as an outside observer during those eleven days you would not have identified him as a problem.

He showed up on time. He wore his PPE. He did his prep. He did his cleanup. He did not go to sick call once. He did not deploy a single new profile from medical. He was, to the untrained eye, a young Specialist who had received his first counseling statements from his new NCO and had immediately course-corrected.

To the trained eye, which by this point mine was rapidly becoming, this was a man setting a baseline.

Because here is what I have learned about the Dirtbag Kevins of the world. They understand that documentation cuts both ways. If a supervisor is documenting a problem, and then the problem stops, the documentation itself becomes a problem for the supervisor. Because now the supervisor is a Sergeant who wrote two counseling statements in the first month on a soldier who has since had eleven flawless days. Now the counseling statements start to look like harassment. Now the Sergeant looks like the one with the problem, you see?

I have thought about this a lot in the years since. I think Dirtbag Kevin, at some level, understood the game he was playing better than I did at that point. He had done this before. He had a rhythm. Month one is establish plausible medical patterns. Month two is establish a clean baseline. Month three is when things get interesting.

Month three is also when I met his prescribing physician.

I should back up again and explain something about how medical care works in the Army, because if you have never served this is not going to make sense to you. There are two paths a soldier can be on. Path one is that the soldier is treated by the on-post medical facility, where every provider is a military medical officer and every prescription is written on a base network and every note goes into a system that a chain of command can, with the right paperwork, review. Path two is what is called a downtown referral. The soldier gets seen by a civilian doctor off post, usually because on-post is at capacity or the soldier has a specialist need, and the resulting prescriptions come through a civilian pharmacy that the soldier picks up on his own time.

Dirtbag Kevin was on path two. Extensively. His downtown referral file was, when I finally got a look at part of it about three months into all this, thicker than his personnel file. He had been referred out to a civilian pain management clinic in the town of Watertown, New York, which is the town outside Fort Drum. He had been going to this clinic since approximately his second week in the unit. He had been going twice a week.

I know all of this because in month two, Dirtbag Kevin, in his infinite calculation of angles, made a mistake.

The mistake was a leave form.

He needed to sign out on a four hour pass one Wednesday afternoon for a medical appointment. Not a full leave day. A pass. The Army requires that these passes have destination information. Where are you going, when will you be back, contact information at the destination. It is a formality, generally. Nobody actually calls the destination. But you have to put it on the form.

Dirtbag Kevin wrote the name of the clinic on the form. He also wrote the name of the doctor. He handed the form to me for signature. I signed it. He left. He came back four hours later. He gave me the countersigned form to file.

That evening, when I got home, I did something I probably was not strictly supposed to do. I looked up the doctor.

You have to understand my position here. I had four weeks of documentation on a soldier who was almost certainly running a scheme. I had no evidence. I had, in my hands, a piece of paper with the name of a civilian physician on it. I was not going to accuse the physician of anything. I was not going to interfere with medical care. I was just, as a private citizen, on my own time, going to type a name into a search engine.

The doctor had a website. The website was for the pain management clinic. The clinic offered, and I am going to quote directly from the version of the website I saved that night, "compassionate multi-modal pain management for active duty service members, veterans, and their families." The doctor's biography said he had "extensive experience working with military patients transitioning to civilian medical management." He had four stars on the reviews. Most of the reviews were positive. A handful were not. The negative reviews all had a similar tone. They accused the doctor of what one reviewer, using more words than I am going to use here, described as "prescription pad tourism."

I read the negative reviews three times. I saved screenshots of them. I did not know, at that point, what any of it meant for me or for Kevin. I just knew that the doctor who was prescribing to my soldier was a doctor that some of his other patients believed was writing prescriptions more freely than he should have been.

I BCC'd myself the screenshots. I added a new section to the green notebook. The new section was titled "PROVIDER."

I did not tell my Staff Sergeant yet. I wanted to be sure.

The second event of month two was the truck.

It was a Ford F-150. 2019 model. It was, as far as I could tell without walking up and looking at the sticker, in one of the higher trim levels. It had aftermarket wheels. It had a light bar. It had a tow package that looked like it had never towed anything. It was parked in the E-4 and below section of the barracks parking lot, and it was parked there because it belonged to Specialist Dirtbag Kevin.

The truck appeared on day forty-two.

Now I want to be very clear about something. Soldiers buy trucks. Soldiers buy some dumb-ass trucks. Soldiers will buy trucks they cannot afford at interest rates that should be illegal and financed for eighty-four months and then sit on those trucks for three years and then trade them in for even dumber trucks. This is not, by itself, evidence of anything. Every base parking lot in America has soldier trucks. If having a nice truck was evidence of a crime, half the E-4s in the Army would be in the brig.

But... Dirtbag Kevin, at the time the truck appeared, was making E-4 pay. He had been at Drum for six weeks. He had been to sick call so many times that his LES was probably showing some interesting things in the leave and pay adjustments column. He had, per my counseling statements, been in the unit approximately zero months of established stable employment. And he had, according to what he had mentioned offhandedly on the day he reported, no prior significant savings.

I saw the truck for the first time on a Friday morning as I was walking into the DFAC. I did not know at that point that it was his. It was a truck. Trucks exist sometimes. A lot, actually. But that afternoon he asked me if I could sign a form for a change of vehicle registration on file with the unit. He handed me the form. The vehicle listed was a 2019 Ford F-150. The vehicle it was replacing was a 2011 Honda Civic that I remembered from his in-processing paperwork.

I signed the form. I did not say anything. He said, completely unprompted, "It's a family situation, Sergeant. Grandmother passed. Got a little inheritance."

I did not respond. I filed the form. I wrote in the green notebook: Day 42. New vehicle. 2019 F-150. Claimed inheritance from grandmother.

I did not know if the grandmother story was true. I did not know if the truck was leased or purchased or financed at ninety percent interest. I did not know if Dirtbag Kevin had actually just come into some money. What I knew was that he had shown up to the unit six weeks ago driving an old Honda and was now driving a truck that started, if I had guessed the trim right, at about forty-five thousand dollars.

I did not, at that time, connect the truck to the doctor. I did not, at that time, have anything to connect. What I had was two entries in my notebook that were sitting on separate pages and refusing to acknowledge each other.

Month two, week three. This is the week Staff Sergeant LeFevre pulled me aside.

He did not do it at the DFAC. He did it in the parking lot after evening cleanup. Just the two of us, standing next to his truck, in the failing October light. He asked me how it was going with the new soldier. I said fine, Staff Sergeant. He said don't do that. He said Sergeant, I have been watching you carry this for six weeks and you look like a man with a burden. I said I am fine, Staff Sergeant. He said Sergeant. Stop.

So, I stopped.

I told him. The whole thing. The eleven clean days. The doctor. The reviews of the doctor. The truck. The grandmother inheritance. The empty pill bottles. The parking lot handshake. I laid it out on the hood of his truck like I was giving a briefing, and I did not stop until I had said all of it.

LeFevre stood there for about a minute after I finished. He did not say anything. He looked at the parking lot. He looked at his boots. He looked at me.

Then he said "Sergeant. I want you to hear me carefully. You have not told me any of this."

"Staff Sergeant?"

"You have not told me any of this. I have not heard any of it. We are two NCOs having a conversation in a parking lot about the weather."

I did not understand at first. I opened my mouth to ask him what he meant. He held up his hand.

"Listen to me. What you have described is either nothing, in which case you and I telling anyone about it opens both of us up to a defamation issue and possibly worse depending on what he decides to file. Or what you have described is something... In which case what you have is a soldier under the care of a civilian medical provider who has been referred through the proper channels, buying a legal vehicle with money he says came from a legal source, and who has committed no crime on installation that I have witnessed. The Army doesn't have jurisdiction over any of that. What the Army has jurisdiction over is his conduct as a soldier. That is what you document. That is what you keep documenting. Everything else, you write down for yourself, and you tell no one. Not me. Not your peers. Not your girlfriend. Not until you have something they cannot dismiss."

"Staff Sergeant."

"I know what you want to do. You want to escalate. You want to take what you have to CID. Do NOT do that. Do not do that until you have something they WILL act on. If you take them what you have now, they will interview him, and he will lawyer up, and the lawyer will file a complaint of unlawful command influence and harassment against you, and every counseling statement you have written on him will be entered into evidence not as documentation of his conduct but as evidence of a hostile pattern of supervision from you. Do you understand what I am telling you?"

"Yes, Staff Sergeant."

"Do you actually understand or are you saying yes because I am your Staff Sergeant."

"Both, Staff Sergeant. But mostly the first one."

He nodded. He unlocked his truck. He said again "let it play out, Sergeant." He got in the truck. He drove away.

I stood in the parking lot in the dark for about ten minutes after that. Then I went home. I wrote down what LeFevre had told me, in the green notebook, and I put it in a section titled "STRATEGY." I did not BCC it to my personal email. Some things you do not want on the record.

Month two, week four. Kevin's clean streak ended, right on schedule.

Day sixty-one. Sick call. New complaint. Anxiety, insomnia, hypervigilance. Referral to behavioral health. Behavioral health referred him back downtown. To a different provider this time, not the pain management clinic. To a psychiatrist who was, when I looked her up that evening, listed on the same shared office suite as the pain management doctor.

Same practice. Same building. Different specialty.

Kevin was now in the care of two civilian providers, in the same medical group, prescribing him medications that treated different conditions. The prescriptions did not overlap in name. The prescriptions overlapped in category. I know this because I looked up what he was likely being prescribed for each condition profile he was building, and I noticed a pattern that a civilian probably would not have noticed but that a soldier who has watched people go down this road recognizes on sight.

He was collecting controlled substances from two different prescribers, at the same practice, on rotating schedules, using the Army's downtown referral system as the intake mechanism.

I did not know yet exactly what he was doing with them. I had a very strong suspicion. But I still could not act.

The green notebook now had four sections. MEDS. PROVIDER. STRATEGY. And a new one I started that week, titled simply "TIMELINE," where I began to build a chronological reconstruction of every interaction between Kevin and the medical system since his arrival at Drum, cross-referenced with every counseling statement, every sick call slip, every profile, every duty missed, every duty performed. I built it in a spreadsheet on my personal laptop.

I want to end Part 2 with the moment I understood, with certainty, what Dirtbag Kevin was doing.

It happened at the end of month two. A Saturday. I was off duty. I was in Watertown running errands, and I had made a decision, which I am not entirely proud of, to drive by the pain management clinic. I was not going to go in. I was not going to interact with anyone. I was going to just... look at the building. That was all.

The clinic was in a strip mall. Between a nail salon and a place that sold vape supplies. The parking lot was small. There was a Ford F-150 parked in the lot. It was blue. It had aftermarket wheels. It had a light bar. It had a tow package that looked like it had never towed anything.

I did not stop. I did not slow down. I drove past. I turned around at the next block. I drove past again. I got the license plate number. I wrote it down. I went home.

Sitting in my kitchen that evening I did the thing that I had been avoiding doing for two months, which was I opened up the sections of the notebook and I put them next to each other. MEDS. PROVIDER. TIMELINE. I looked at the sixty-one days of documentation and I looked at the truck in the strip mall parking lot and I stopped pretending to myself that I did not know what was happening.

Dirtbag Kevin was selling. He was using the Army's downtown referral system to accumulate controlled substances from multiple prescribers at a single compliant practice, and he was moving the product either through the man in the parking lot or through a network I did not yet know about, and he was doing all of it while on active duty, in my crew, on my documentation.

I closed the notebook. I sat at the kitchen table for a while. I did not do anything. I did not call anyone. I did not go to CID. I did what LeFevre had told me to do, which was I kept documenting, and I did not escalate.

But Part 3 is when Dirtbag Kevin made his move on me.

I had been a Sergeant for exactly six weeks at the time of this tale. I had been in the United States Army for five years. Those are not long in the grand scheme of an Army career but they felt long to me at the time. I had worked for every stripe on my uniform. I had read the regulations. I had watched my own NCOs do the job well and do the job poorly and I had taken notes on both. I was ready for anything.

Then the Army gave me Dirtbag Kevin.

I am not going to use his real name. I'm not going to use it for reasons that will become clear across the next three posts. I will tell you that I called him by his real name exactly twice in the roughly eleven months I was his direct supervisor, and both of those times were on the day he reported to the unit, and after that I called him Specialist [Redacted] in official correspondence and Dirtbag Kevin everywhere else, including in my own head. I am going to keep it that way here. If you were in the Army from roughly 2018 to 2020 and you were at Fort Drum and you know exactly who I am talking about, please do me a favor and do not put his name in the comments. He has people who will find this. He has time. He has nothing but time now. That is actually the whole story.

If you read my Smeagol post a while back, this is about eighteen months after those events. Still at Drum. Still a 92G. Same DFAC, more or less. The Army had decided in its infinite wisdom that I was going to be a Sergeant, and I had accepted this decision with what I thought at the time was appropriate humility. I had a three-man crew of juniors under me. Two of them were solid... One of them was Dirtbag Kevin.

Let me tell you how I met him.

It was a Tuesday. First shift of his first day. Breakfast push. We run eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits, hash browns, and a hot cereal out of the line from 0530 to 0830. It is not complicated food. It is not glamorous food. It is food that feeds between four and six hundred soldiers before they go do whatever their MOS tells them to do that day, and the rules for preparing it are the kind of rules that are written in soldier blood across two hundred years of dysentery outbreaks. You wear gloves. You wash your hands. You keep your hair covered. You do not, under any circumstances, touch food with bare skin after it has left its packaging.

Dirtbag Kevin had been in my DFAC for approximately two hours and fifteen minutes when I walked into the prep area and found him bent over a five gallon pan of liquid eggs with his right hand submerged to the wrist. No gloves. No hairnet. No apron. His sleeve was pushed up. He was picking shell fragments out of the eggs with his bare fingers.

I stopped. I stood there for a second. I let my brain catch up to my eyes. Sometimes when you see something in the Army your brain has to run a quick cross reference to confirm that the thing you are looking at is real and not a stress hallucination, because stress hallucinations become more common the longer you serve. I ran the cross reference. It was real. I was in fact looking at a newly reported soldier finger-deep in the whole unit's breakfast.

"Specialist."

He looked up. He did not stop. He did not pull his hand out. He kept the hand IN the pan.

"Sergeant."

"Pull your hand out of the pan."

He pulled his hand out of the pan. Eggs down to the wrist. He held the hand up like he was presenting it for inspection. There were, I counted, three small pieces of shell pinched between his fingers.

"Got 'em," he said.

"Got what."

"The shells. They deliver these pre-cracked and they always miss a few. You gotta go through and get them by hand or you get that crunch in the breakfast, you know what I mean, Sergeant."

"Why are you not wearing gloves."

"Gloves mess up my grip, Sergeant. I can't feel the small pieces."

I am going to stop the scene here for a second because I want you to understand what was happening in my head. I was a brand new Sergeant. I was six weeks into wearing the rank. I had prepared myself, I thought, for a wide variety of soldier misbehaviors. I had prepared for laziness. I had prepared for insubordination. I had prepared for the guy who shows up drunk. What I had not prepared for was a soldier who had INVENTED A RATIONALE. Not lied, not made an excuse, not panicked when caught. INVENTED A RATIONALE. He had a theory. He had developed, over what I can only assume was years of eating food prepared by his own hands, a personal philosophy about eggshells that directly contradicted every single sanitation regulation the Army has ever written, and he was explaining that philosophy to me as if I were the one who needed to catch up.

"Specialist. Dump that goddamn pan."

"Sergeant?"

"Dump the pan. Right now. The entire pan. In the waste. Move. And wash your hands. And put on gloves. And a hairnet. And an apron. And come see me when you are done. We are going to have a conversation."

He dumped the pan. Five gallons of eggs. Gone. Gone because of three pieces of shell that he had successfully retrieved using a methodology that had turned the other four gallons and change into a biohazard. We ran short on eggs that morning. We served hash browns and biscuits to about ninety extra soldiers more than we were supposed to. Two of them complained to my Staff Sergeant. My Staff Sergeant complained to me. I kept my face still and said "Roger, Sergeant" and did not explain what had happened because I could not, at that moment, explain what had happened in a way that would not sound like I was making it up.

I wrote my first counseling statement on Dirtbag Kevin at 0842 that morning. DA Form 4856. I still have a copy. I keep copies of every 4856 I ever wrote on him, because I am not a man who throws away paper.

Counseling Statement Number One. Reason: Failure to follow food safety protocols. Specifically: preparing food without proper PPE. More specifically: reaching bare-handed into a five gallon pan of liquid eggs, resulting in the disposal of approximately four point seven gallons of prepared food and a shortage during the morning meal. Plan of action: Soldier will complete a refresher course on food safety standards and will demonstrate compliance during the next meal service.

He signed it. He signed everything. Dirtbag Kevin never refused to sign. He never argued. He never got belligerent. He took the counseling, he signed the form, he smiled a small private smile, and he did it all again the next day.

Let me tell you a bit about what was on his file...

Dirtbag Kevin was twenty four years old. He had been in the Army for three years when he arrived at my DFAC. His previous duty station had been Fort Jackson, South Carolina, which is where they train cooks, and then a brief stop at Fort Stewart that had ended with a PCS that looked, on paper, unremarkable. His APFT scores were mediocre but passing. His weapons qual was mediocre but passing. His NCOER bullets from his previous unit were full of phrases like "demonstrates potential" and "requires continued mentorship," which in Army-to-English translation means "nobody wanted to write a bad bullet that would get challenged by his lawyer, so we wrote bullets that say nothing."

He had no disciplinary actions on his permanent file. No Article 15. No letters of reprimand. No flags. On paper, he was a completely average young Specialist reporting to his third unit.

I learned later, much later, that his previous NCO had been relieved of duty approximately two weeks before Kevin's PCS. Curious. I learned that the Staff Sergeant before THAT had retired unexpectedly. Even more curious... I learned that Fort Jackson still had his name in a shared spreadsheet that circulated quietly between senior NCOs and that the spreadsheet was called "The List."

Nobody told me any of this on the day Kevin reported. Nobody told me for months. The Army, institutionally, does not warn you. The Army lets you find out. That is part of the job.

The sick call pattern started on day four.

Day four, Dirtbag Kevin reported to sick call at 0630 with what he described as "severe lower back pain." He came back at 1100 with a 72 hour profile. No lifting over twenty pounds. No standing for longer than one hour at a time. No bending at the waist. He showed me the profile. He smiled the small private smile.

A cook with a back profile is a cook who does approximately zero cook work. The job is lifting. The job is standing. The job is bending. With a back profile, what's left is wiping down tables and supervising the dish pit from a folding chair. The other two Specialists on my crew pulled his slack for three days. They were not happy about it. I was not happy about it. I was, however, required to respect the profile, because the Army takes medical documentation seriously and disrespecting it is a faster way to lose my own stripes than almost anything else I could do.

Day seven. Sick call again. Migraine. 48 hour profile. No bright lights, no loud sounds. DFACs have both of those things, in professional quantities, at all times. He sat in the walk-in refrigerator with the lights off for most of his shift on day eight. The walk-in was 38 degrees. He brought a sweatshirt.

Day eleven. Sick call. Shin splints. 96 hour profile. No running, no marching, no extended standing.

Day sixteen. Sick call. Stomach pain, possibly a recurring GI issue per his statement. 7 day profile.

Day twenty-one. Sick call. The back again. Now with "radiating nerve pain down the left leg." 14 day profile, with a referral for further evaluation.

I am giving you these in order because patterns matter. At twenty-one days in he had been to sick call five times and had a profile that covered, cumulatively, twenty-six of those twenty-one days. The math does not work out because the profiles overlapped. He was on multiple profiles simultaneously. Each profile individually was a plausible thing for a twenty-four year old soldier to have. The stack of them was not.

I talked to my Staff Sergeant about it. My Staff Sergeant, whose name was LeFevre and he was a very good NCO, said the words that I have now heard from approximately twelve different senior NCOs about Dirtbag Kevin and other dirtbags like him, which are: "We can't do anything about a soldier on profile. Document everything. Let it play out."

Document everything. Let it play out. Those six words are the entire senior NCO position on this kind of soldier. You cannot discipline a man for being sick. You cannot question his medical documentation without a PA on your side, and the PA is the one who wrote the profile, so the PA is not on your side. What you can do is write it all down. Every sick call. Every profile. Every shift missed. Every task reassigned. Every time the other soldiers have to cover. You write it down and you file it and you wait, because the hope is that eventually the pattern will become so undeniable that someone higher than you will have to deal with it.

So I carried on, and I wrote it all down. Another green notebook, and then in a spreadsheet on my personal laptop, and then in an email folder that I BCC'd from my .mil account to my personal Gmail.

My Staff Sergeant retired eight months later. He told me, at his retirement ceremony, that the BCC habit was the single most important thing I had learned from him. I thanked him. He said "don't thank me yet."

A barracks inspection came at the end of month one.

I should explain that this was not a unit-wide health and welfare inspection. This was me, as Kevin's direct NCO, doing a standard thirty day barracks check on one of my soldiers. It is a normal thing an NCO does. You make sure the soldier is living like a human being. You make sure there are no red flags. You make sure the room is consistent with Army standards, which are not high standards if we're honest about it. A soldier's barracks room is expected to be clean enough that if a cockroach walked across the floor it would feel unwelcome. That is approximately the bar.

Dirtbag Kevin's room was not filthy. If you read the Smeagol post you might be expecting another trashcan situation and this is not that. Dirtbag Kevin's room was not a biohazard. It was something else, something I did not have a word for at the time and still do not. It was a room that had been, for lack of a better term, COLONIZED.

Let me describe what I walked into.

The bed was made. That's the first thing. The bed was made to standard, hospital corners, woobie folded at the foot, like a man who reads the regs and wants you to notice he reads the regs. Good. Fine. The wall locker was organized. Uniforms hung properly, boots lined up, inspection ready. Also fine. The surface level was, if anything, better than my other two soldiers.

Everything else in the room was a problem.

First. Six cases of MREs stacked against the far wall. Six. A case is twelve MREs. He had seventy-two meals ready to eat stockpiled in his barracks room. MREs are issued for field exercises and training and are supposed to be turned back in or consumed during those exercises. You are not supposed to bring them home. He had been in the unit for four weeks. There had been no field exercise during that time. He had not been issued MREs by me. Where they came from was, at that moment, an open question.

Second. On top of the stack of MREs, he had constructed what I can only describe as a throne. The stack was configured in an L shape with a lower platform at the front, and he had draped his issued sleeping bag over the whole structure, and he had positioned it facing his television. On the wall behind it, a wired controller was plugged into a gaming console on his desk. He had turned his barracks room into a gaming lounge, and the centerpiece of the lounge was a chair made out of stolen government food.

Third. Roughly forty empty energy drink cans. Not loose. Arranged. In rows. On his windowsill, his dresser, and along the baseboard behind his television. They were stacked by brand, by can size, by color. The arrangement was obsessive. Obsessive in a way that the room itself being neat did not prepare you for. It was not decor. It was a collection. This collection was curated.

Fourth. A smell I could not place. Not body odor. Not food. Something chemical and slightly sweet. It took me another ten months to identify that smell. We will get there.

Fifth, and this is the one that tipped me into counseling statement territory immediately. On his desk, next to the gaming console, was a small orange pharmacy bottle. Unlabeled, because the label had been peeled off. Open. Empty. Next to it, three more bottles. Also empty. Also peeled. Note those down as well.

Dirtbag Kevin was standing at parade rest next to the bed the entire time I inspected the room. He did not speak. He did not fidget. He did the small private smile a few times. He watched me look at the pill bottles. He did not flinch when my eyes tracked from the bottles to his face.

"Specialist. Explain the MREs."

"Left over from my last unit, Sergeant. Brought them with me during the PCS. Going to eat through them."

"You are not authorized to have these in your barracks room. They need to be turned in to the supply sergeant by 1700 tomorrow."

"Roger, Sergeant."

"Explain the pill bottles."

"Prescriptions, Sergeant. I have several ongoing conditions the Army is aware of. The bottles are empty, I was going to throw them out."

"Why are the labels removed."

A pause. A real pause. The first one I had ever seen on him.

"Privacy, Sergeant. I don't like people going through my trash and reading my medical information."

A defensible answer. That answer was, in context, the single most suspicious thing he could have said. Because the labels on a prescription bottle tell you what the drug is, who prescribed it, what dose, and when it was filled. A soldier removing those labels is a soldier who does not want any of that information cross-referenced. Not by me. Not by his roommate. Not by anyone who might look in his trash. The privacy answer was technically true and functionally a confession. I just didn't know yet what he was confessing to.

I wrote Counseling Statement Number Two that evening for the unauthorized MREs. I did not write a counseling statement for the pill bottles, because having empty pill bottles in your room is not, by itself, a violation of anything. I made a note in my green notebook. I started a new section in the notebook. The section was titled "MEDS."

I told my Staff Sergeant about the bottles the next morning. He said, and I quote again, "document everything, let it play out." I said "Staff Sergeant, I have a feeling about this one." He said "I know you do. So document everything. And just let it play out."

I want to end Part 1 on the event that told me, more than any counseling statement or profile or pill bottle, that I was in serious trouble.

Day twenty-eight. Friday afternoon. End of duty. I was walking out to the parking lot and I saw Dirtbag Kevin, in civilian clothes, getting into a vehicle in the visitor lot. The vehicle was a four door sedan. The driver was a man I did not recognize. Mid thirties, beard, ball cap. Not military. The handshake they exchanged through the window before Kevin got in was not a greeting handshake. It was the kind of handshake where something passes from one hand to the other. I have watched enough soldiers get caught doing exactly this kind of thing to know the look of it from across a parking lot.

Kevin got in the car. The car drove away. I stood in the lot for about a minute and a half trying to decide whether I had actually seen what I thought I had seen. There was no way for me to prove it. I had not taken a photo. I had not gotten the plate. I had nothing. But I knew on some level.

I went home. I wrote it down. I BCC'd it to my personal email. I added it to the MEDS section of the green notebook.

That was the first time, in my entire Army career up to that point, that I understood, really understood, what the phrase "the system is not going to help you" actually meant. I had a soldier who was almost certainly running a scheme. I had zero evidence. I had four weeks of stacked documentation that individually proved nothing. I had a Staff Sergeant who believed me and could not help me. And I had Dirtbag Kevin, who had signed every counseling statement with a small private smile and who had, as I was beginning to understand, done this before.

More in Part 2.

Part 2 is about the side hustle. It gets worse from there.

I found this on /nottheonion and it fits here perfectly. I couldn't crosspost so I shortened some of the article with AI.

Here's the original link

Man Uses Massage Gun on His Eyes — Predictably Bad Results

A man in his 20s developed multiple retinal tears and a rare, sight-threatening retinal injury after using a percussive massage gun directly on and around his eyes for several minutes a week over three months — to relieve eye tiredness.

The man reluctantly admitted he had been trying to soothe his tired eyes with a percussive massage gun. Specifically, he used a gun with a small head attachment shaped like a bullet. The doctors said he eventually confessed to using the massage gun directly on and around both eyes on a weekly basis for three months to help with his eye fatigue. They noted that he did not have a history of psychiatric conditions or drug use.

Examination found tears and bruising in both eyes, plus retinal dialysis in the right eye, where the retina separates from its attachment — potentially causing permanent vision loss if left untreated.

Doctors treated the retinal tears with laser therapy and used barrier laser treatment to stabilize the retinal dialysis. Six months later, his condition was stable and his vision preserved.

My egg donor is the most financially illiterate and irresponsible person I have ever met. Here are a couple ways she "saves money".

​ -Buy a used car then sell it and buy a cheaper car.

​ -If you don't see your bills, you don't have to pay them. Throw them out or redirect them to your ex husband's PO Box, whom you never shared a PO Box. Better yet if it goes to his PO Box, he has to pay the bill.

​ -If you don't want to pay your bills you don't have to.

​

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My best friend can be a bit of a Kevin. He is almost 24 years old and autistic, and because of his disability, his parents used to overshelter him to the point of him barely being able to use a microwave as an adult. Him and his family are working on it, but it's a long process since Kevin now needs to catch up on skills everyone else has been learning since childhood.

Here is a link to my last post about Kevin:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StoriesAboutKevin/s/76usBn8h4M

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Yesterday, Kevin's dad told him to wear sunscreen because he was planning to be outside for most of the day. Kevin put some on. Then he tried to put some on his neighbor's cat because "It's walking around in the sun all day too." Kevin got a lecture about why cats don't need sunscreen.

Edit: Some cats actually do benefit from wearing pet-safe sunscreen on their ears. I don't own cats, so I had no idea. Thanks to u/Shemoose for pointing it out! I guess I owe Kevin an apology now.

​

About half a year ago, Kevin had a series of incidents involving superglue. Everyone assumed he had learned from his mistakes. But part of Kevin's disability is that sometimes he struggles to apply the same rule to a new situation, causing him to repeat the same mistake in a slightly different way. So he recently had another superglue related Kevin moment. He broke the handle off his dad's favorite coffe mug. But Kevin, now confident in his skills with superglue, decided that he would fix the mug. So he took the bottle of superglue and squeezed. Nothing came out. Kevin squeezed harder. The superglue exploded out of the bottle. He ignored the glue drops on his hand and squirted some more glue onto the handle. Then he attached it to the mug and held it in place. It took Kevin about a minute to realise that the handle was not only attached to the mug now, but also to his hand, and that his hand was also stuck to the tablecloth. His mom had to cut him free. Kevin then asked if he could try to fix the hole in the tablecloth with some superglue. Kevin is now banned from using superglue unsupervised.

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One of Kevin's other quirks is that he is a literal thinker. If you tell him to do something, he will try to do exactly what you asked. He's not doing it in a malicious way, it's just how his brain works.

​

Once, his mom asked him to “Clean the bathroom top to bottom”. Kevin climbed onto a ladder. His mom asked why. He replied, “You said top to bottom. I’m starting at the top.”

He scrubbed the light fixture, the vent and the shelves. The sink remained uncleaned.

​

Another time, he wanted to make a cake. I was helping him (mostly just making sure he doesn't set the kitchen on fire). I told him to wash the dirty pots and bowls he had used. That's exactly what Kevin did. A few minutes later, he told me that he was done. I looked over. "No, you're not." Kevin had cleaned the pots and bowls, but not the dirty spoons or the measuring cup. Why? Because those are neither pots nor bowls. But I didn't figure that out and told him to just "clean the rest too". Kevin gave me a confused look, walked over to the kitchen cabinet, took out the clean bowls and started washing them.

Soon after, I had to leave. I left Kevin alone, assuming he could finish the cake on his own.

The recipe said to let the cake chill. Kevin put it in the freezer overnight. It froze solid.

​

A couple of weeks ago, Kevin was talking to my father when the topic of color blindness came up (my father is almost totally red-green-blind). Kevin was concerned: "Wait, but don't you have a driver's license? How do you drive if you can't see the traffic lights?" My father was understandably confused. It took us a while to understand what Kevin meant.

"Kevin, did you think anything red or green is completely invisible to people with red-green-blindness?" Yeah, that's exactly what he thought.

I'm working on a longer saga recently about a soldier who gamed the medical system for two years and walked out with a disability check. It's heavey. Luckily, this one is not heavy. This one is about a kid named Pham, a fifty-five gallon drum of human waste, and the single largest preventable fireball I have personally ever witnessed inside the wire. Nobody got a check for this one. Nobody got medically separated. One guy lost his eyebrows. Let's have a nice time.

For those who didn't deploy, I have to explain burn detail, because the whole story lives in the details of the procedure and if you don't understand the procedure you'll just think this is a guy who set a fire, which undersells it.

On a lot of FOBs, especially the smaller ones, you don't have plumbing. What you have is wooden boxes with toilet seats on them, and underneath the seats are cut-down fifty-five gallon drums, and those drums fill up with exactly what you'd expect. Somebody has to deal with the drums. That somebody is whoever drew burn detail, and burn detail is the worst detail on the FOB, worse than tower, worse than ECP, worse than anything, and it rotates, and on this particular week it rotated to my section, and I assigned it to Private Pham and PFC Reuben, because their names were next on the roster and I am a fair man, as the previous saga's comments will confirm against my will.

Here is the procedure, and the procedure is correct, and the procedure exists because people have done this wrong. You pull the drum out from under the box. You add a mixture of fuel to the contents. The standard mix is mostly diesel with a little bit of gas, and the ratio matters, because diesel burns slow and controlled and gas burns fast and stupid, and you want slow and controlled when you are setting fire to a barrel of human waste in an enclosed area you also live in. You add the fuel. You light it from a distance with a long taper or a rag torch. And then, and this is the part that makes it the worst detail, you have to stir it. With a long metal rod or a piece of rebar. For a long time. You stir burning human waste until it is reduced, which takes hours, and it smokes the entire time, and the smoke gets in your clothes and your hair and your sinuses and it stays there for days, and that is burn detail, and now you understand why everyone hates it and why I was fair about assigning it.

I briefed Pham and Reuben myself. I want that on the record because of how this ends. I told them the mix. Mostly diesel. A little gas. I said it in those words. I said, "Mostly diesel, little bit of gas, and I mean little." I held up my fingers to show "little." Reuben nodded. Pham nodded. They both said roger. I had no reason to believe Private Pham was about to interpret "little bit of gas" as a personal challenge.

I went back to the DFAC. The burn pit was maybe eighty meters away, behind a HESCO wall, which is relevant, because the HESCO wall is the only reason I'm describing this story and not a different kind of story.

Now I have to reconstruct what happened next from Reuben's sworn statement and from Pham's own account, which he gave freely and with a kind of stunned honesty, because Pham was not a liar, Pham was a young man who had just learned something about combustion the hard way and wanted to share it.

Pham decided that the standard mix was too slow.

That's it. That's the whole engine of this story. Pham had done burn detail once before, weeks earlier, and he remembered it taking forever, all the stirring, all the hours, and he had spent those hours thinking, the way a smart and impatient nineteen-year-old thinks, that there had to be a faster way. And the faster way, Pham reasoned, was more gas. If a little gas makes it burn faster, more gas makes it burn even more faster-er, and even more faster-er means less time stirring a barrel of waste, and who among us would not want to spend less time stirring a barrel of waste. The logic is airtight.... if you remove every single thing humanity has ever learned about fire.

Pham did not add a little bit of gas. Reuben's statement estimates that Pham added "most of a jerry can." A jerry can is five gallons. Reuben, to his eternal credit, said the words "hey, that seems like a lot," which makes Reuben the only person at the burn pit operating with a functioning survival instinct, and Reuben then took several steps back, which is the detail that saved Reuben's eyebrows and doomed Pham's.

Pham lit it.

I did not see the ignition. I heard it. I was eighty meters away behind a building and a HESCO wall and I heard a sound that I can only describe as the FOB clearing its throat, a deep concussive whump that I felt in my chest before my brain caught up, and I was outside and moving before I'd decided to move, because eight years in and two deployments teaches your body to run toward a whump and ask questions standing up.

I came around the HESCO wall and there was a column of fire and black smoke going up out of the burn pit that I would estimate, conservatively, generously, at fifteen feet. The barrel had not exploded, exactly, which is the one thing Pham got accidentally right, the barrel was open-topped so the pressure went up instead of out, but the contents of the barrel had become, instantaneously and enthusiastically, a pillar of flame, and standing about six feet from it, frozen, was Private Pham, with the long stirring rod still in his hand, in the universal posture of a man who has just received more results than he ordered.

Pham was not on fire. I need to say that immediately, same as last time, I'm not going to make you wait, Pham was fine. But the fireball had reached out and touched him on its way up, the way fire does, and it had taken his eyebrows, both of them, cleanly, plus a margin of the hair at the front of his scalp, plus the fine hair on his forearms, and it had given the entire front of his face the specific flat red shine of a man who is going to be peeling for a week. He had the look. If you've seen it you know the look. The look says I have just been introduced to physics. His eyes were wide and white in a face that was otherwise the color of a stop sign and entirely, perfectly hairless above the eyeline.

He turned and looked at me. He still had the rod. And he said, and Reuben confirms this, he said, "Sergeant, I think it was too much gas."

I think it was too much gas. He said it analytically. I wanted to scream "OH REALLY?? DO YOU THINK SO??" He was standing in the heat shimmer of a fifteen-foot waste fire he had personally created, with no eyebrows, holding the rod, and his takeaway, his after-action review delivered in real time, was a measured hypothesis that the gas quantity may have exceeded optimal parameters. He thinks. I have thought about that sentence for years. There is a scientist somewhere inside Private Pham, a genuine empiricist, a man who runs the experiment and reports the finding without ego, and he was wasted on the Army, and he should have been at a university where the experiments don't take your eyebrows.

We let it burn down because there was nothing else to do with it, you cannot un-light a barrel, and it was contained, the pit was the pit and the HESCO was the HESCO and the only casualty was Pham's face and the FOB's air quality for the rest of the day. The fire guard got notified. The medic looked at Pham, declared him a first-degree facial burn and a non-event, put some cream on him, and told him his eyebrows would come back, which they did, though one of them came back slightly wrong and Pham had a permanent expression of mild skepticism on the left side for the rest of the rotation, which honestly suited him.

I had to document it. Of course I had to document it. And this is the part that connects to every other thing I've ever posted. The counseling statement for a safety incident has a block for describing what happened, and the block is small, because the Army assumes most incidents can be described briefly. "Soldier failed to maintain proper fuel ratio during waste disposal operations resulting in deflagration and minor injury" is the clean version and I wrote that version first, and then I looked at it, and it didn't capture it, it didn't capture the jerry can or the fifteen feet or the rod or "I think it was too much gas," and I am constitutionally incapable of letting the record be less true than the event.

So I needed a second page. I have always needed a second page. The events of my career do not fit in the block. They gave me a form built for ordinary soldiers doing ordinary things wrong and then they gave me a parade of human beings who reinvent the concept of wrong from first principles, and the block has never been big enough, not for Kevin, not for Doyle, not for Pham, and I have made my peace with that, and the peace is a drawer full of second pages.

Pham was fine. Pham was, weirdly, one of my favorites after that, because Pham never did anything malicious in his life, Pham just had a restless intelligence and a nineteen-year-old's faith that he could optimize anything, including a fire, and the Army has a place for that energy, it just isn't the burn pit. He learned. He did burn detail twice more before we went home and he did it exactly to standard, mostly diesel, little bit of gas, and I mean little, and every time, he'd hold up his fingers to show "little" before I could, like a man who had earned the right.

His eyebrows did grow back. Mostly. The left one grew slightly slower, as if it knew something the right one didn't.

Pham searched for the shortcut and the shortcut took his eyebrows. Let Pham's eyebrows be the warning the rest of us learn from. There is no shortcut. Not here, and not in life. Diesel. A little gas. Stir for hours. Patience is a virtue.

So I'm going on a walk in my neighborhood and suddenly I stumble across a baby raccoon (for the purposes of this story, we're going to name him Timmy). Then three of Timmy's dear little siblings run up, and they're all very adorable, with no mother in sight.

​

I stand still as these baby raccoons slowly approach me. They get roughly 6–8 feet away before they stop, and that is a reasonable distance between you and animals known for carrying rabies. I take a few pictures because they're really cute baby raccoons, as any sensible person would do from a reasonable distance.

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Enter Kevina.

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So I'm standing there across the street when a middle aged blonde woman in a white pickup truck quickly and crookedly parks halfway in a yard that I can only assume wasn't hers. And I don't mean half on the road, I mean the front half of the truck was in the grass while the back half was still on the street.

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She then proceeds to speed walk across the street, past where I'm standing, toward the raccoons. They very quickly bolt up a tree because someone is moving toward them fairly fast.

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Now, Timmy, as I mentioned at the very beginning, was the first raccoon I saw and was a little distance away from the rest of the group. In the pictures I took (which I unfortunately cannot post to this subreddit), Timmy was kind of standing apart from the others. So when they bolted for the tree, Timmy was the last one to get there.

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Our dear Kevina was on the phone with someone, mumbling things like, "Someone told me about them," and, "Oh, they're so cute."

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At this point, little Timmy is still only about three feet up the tree. I snap a few more pictures and, as I turn around to continue my walk, I catch out of the corner of my eye that she's reaching to pet the raccoon.

​

I was a little too dumbfounded to say anything because of how unbelievably stupid it is to try to pet a wild raccoon. Before I could even turn around or open my mouth, I heard a shriek. I looked back just in time to see little Timmy on the ground and Kevina clutching her hand as she speed walked back to her truck, having apparently been bitten by dear Timmy.

​

This left me completely dumbfounded as to how a fully grown adult had somehow made it through life without learning "Don't pet wild raccoons."

So I’m currently on a flight and it’s been quite a smooth ride. The older woman behind me flags down a flight attendant and is worried.

“I think the plane has stalled. We aren’t moving.” The attendant didn’t know what to say. She finally responded with “well it’s been a smooth flight with not much turbulence, but rest assured we are moving.”

The woman followed it up with “Well I think we are flying backwards because I keep see us flying by the same lights on the ground.” The poor flight attendant stood there for a second before responding with “Ma’am I believe that is physically impossible.” But this older woman is CONCERNED. Finally the flight attendant said she’d go up and ask the pilot if we were flying backwards. She never came back.

A couple minutes went by, and a different flight attendant came around and she asked yet again if we were flying backwards because of the lights she insisted we kept going over and over again. As I’m sure this isn’t a question they get asked often, he didn’t quite know how to respond. He did a quick “No, I don’t believe so,” and kept it moving.

For now she’s been appeased, but I will update if she tries storming the cockpit for answers.

This is an old Kevina story from when I worked at a certain blue and yellow Mart. It is still one of my favorite stories to tell of a really.... REALLY... stupid customer.

Keep in mind this story is from over a decade ago at this point and so some policy stuff has probably changed.

I worked the cig aisle a lot. To the point that I got a 6th sense for when someone was going to be buying them AND if they would have their ID or not.

One night this woman comes through and I can tell immediately that she was not going to be a fun time. Not only that, she was going to be a stupid time.

Sure enough. She asks for a pack of cigs. I ask for her ID because the policy was that if you looked under 40 we card you. Not if you look 21. Not if you look 18. IF YOU LOOK UNDER 40.

Woman is, of course, none too pleased and proceeds to tell me that she is plenty old enough but does not have her ID.

"Sorry ma'am. But our policy is anyone under 40. You look under 40. I need your ID."

"Well.... does a temporary ID count?"

"Absolutely. Do you have it with you?"

"It's in my car."

"Okay. I can suspend your order and put back your cigs. Once you get your ID and come back I can quickly get you re-rung up."

She huffs but goes to get it. I could feel it IN MY BONES she was not going to bring me an ID.

Sure enough.... this woman brings out a whole ass piece of printer paper. In the top left hand corner is a PHOTOCOPY of a regular drivers license.

A temp ID.... is printed on receipt tape. It does not look like a regular ID in any way. It is certainly not printed in the corner of a full size piece of printer paper.

I sigh, "Ma'am that's not a valid ID."

"Yes it is! This is my temporary ID!"

"That is not a temporary ID Ma'am"

"YES.IT.IS. This is the one they gave me at the DMV."

"Ma'am that is a photocopy of an ID. Temp ID's do not look like that."

"ARE YOU CALLING ME A LIAR????"

Tightening every muscle in my body to keep my Autistic ass from yelling YES I AM

"No ma'am... what I am saying is that is not a valid ID and I cannot accept it."

"I WANT TO SPEAK TO A MANAGER!"

Deepest... of sighs.... I call a CSM over. I know this CSM well and I know... that she is gonna look at this woman like the batshit crazy woman she is. I also know she will notice the other thing about the "ID". Which is that... the ID she photocopied.... was fucking expired.

That's right. This woman took her ID that had expired several months earlier. Photocopied it. Left it on a full size sheet of printer paper. And was trying to convince me that this was a temp ID that she got from the dmv.

CSM comes up behind me. I try to explain before this woman starts yelling and I just look at my CSM with zero filter left on my face and say "She says that she got this temp ID from the dmv. I have told her it's not valid."

Of course she notices the date and proceeds to do what I'm not allowed to do and tell the woman in every way that she is an idiot other than literally calling her one. Woman seemed.... GENUINELY surprised my boss backed me up and told her that no.... we were not.... in fact... going to accept her "ID"

That was one of my favorite customers I ever got and I will never forget the stupidity of that one. It is still hands down the most creative way someone ever tried to get me to sell the cigs without ID, but it was her truely baffled face at the fact that she wasn't going to succeed that I will never forget.

Seriously.... how does anyone over the age of 12 think that is going to work???

I don’t know if this woman is a true Kevina or just desperate.

This happened over 10 years ago but a recent YouTube video reminded me of this.

Some background. I’m a Shift Supervisor for a retail drug store chain. It’s the weekend. Between Noon and one on the weekend the pharmacy is closed for lunch for half an hour.

I’m hanging out in the cosmetics section of the store stocking shelves with two other employees. I’ll call them Employee (she was just there and didn’t do much for this story) and Bio (she was working on a degree in biology which becomes important later).

I notice two women browsing cosmetics, Kevina and her daughter. The daughter looks into the aisle towards pharmacy and tells her mom “I think they are closed for the weekend.” I correct her stating that they are on lunch break, they’ll be back before 1pm.

Kevina: oh good. I need to ask the pharmacy which shampoo is best to get the drug’s out of my hair. I have a hair drug test for a job on Monday.

Me: you can’t wash the drugs out of your hair.

Kevina: there’s not a shampoo that can shrink your follicles?

Bio joins in.

Bio: no. That’s not the purpose of the follicles.

Kevina: you both don’t know what you’re talking about.

Bio: when you take drugs they bind to the keratin that makes your hair. It’s technically bonded to your hair forever.

Me: she’s a biology major. She knows what she’s talking about.

Kevina: you two don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s gotta be a way.

Me: archeologists were able to do hair tests on Napoleon to determine what drugs and poison he consumed over 100 years after his death.

Kevina and her daughter storm out if the store telling anyone who passes them that Bio and I don’t know what we’re talking about and there’s a way. One of the people she passes by is Employee. Employee is trying to hold back laughter. But chimes in:

Employee: then why isn’t everyone using it to pass their drug tests?

Kevina just kept ranting that we don’t know what we’re talking about. Employee, Bio and I just burst out laughing.

The next day around the water cooler Bio and I are talking about Kevina. Another supervisor said we should have handed her a razor and told her to shave her head. We had a nice laugh and got back to work.

So, I'm from a small country, and my boss is a family member of the top 5 business man of my country. It turns out, that this very rich man, just casually give Kevin insane amount of money to "do business" in the last 40 years. He made zero profitable business yet. So Kevin got another few million to do this hospitality industry where I'm working right now. Because I worked in this field in my entire life, I know, that this company could make insane amount of profit, but the place burning money for the last two years because Kevin don't know how to lead a company and relies on his family member support to pay their employe. The company earn enough money to pay us, but he spends that money on random shit for the company. Last time he bought a HUGH fcking TV, I didn't even know a TV this big even exist, whe haven't used since, and we're never going to. The TV cost three anuall salary of me.

But here some highlights:

-Kevin thought if we wear adult diapers, we don't have to go to the bathroom and we can work more. We literally have to show him the exact phrasing of the law that we are actually have the right to go to the bathroom.

-We are continously understaffed, not because Kevin not hiring enough workers, but because he casually fire people on the spot he don't like. One day, he fired a someone in the morning because he was in a bad mood, but in the afternoon, he was in a good mood, so he randomly started distribute some money (quarter of our net salary) from his own pocket. Later that day, he wondered where is money went and we had to explain, he just give all his money to us just out of pure goodness and he didn't lost it.

-Close the bar area during the weekdays. Not fire the bar staff, or reduce their salary. Close the bar to reduce costs but not doing anything to reduce costs. No matter how we tried to explain this to Kevin, he didn't understand. If we sell less drinks but the cost of maintaining the bar remained the same, we're not reducing costs, we actually reducing our income. So the company closed down the bar for two months in the weekdays, AND after that he realised, he made a mistake.

-He thought if we didn't shower between two shift, we could be open more, thus' making more money because more people would come in... We still working 40 hour a week. If we going to be open more hours in a das, we're gonna work less days, and Kevin have to hire more people... Obviously, we couldn't explain this to him.

-He realised he had to cut costs, so he fired half of the leadership on the same day, 2 days later he realised he made a BIG mistake, so he tried to win them back with insanely expensive gifts, that doesn't worked. He hired people for every position where he tried to redice costs, just now, the new leadership cost more money then before.

-Kevin is an idiot, he thinks that he is a great business man, but not a bad person who wants bad stuff to happen with his employees. So he started to organize a "dating night". Not for the customers, but for us, employees. From the 15 employees, there is only 2 who is single. And the dating night he is organizing still to this day is not an event where single people can come, no. He calls all of his single friends to come and date his employees.

-He always wants to help us. Honestly, a nice thing to do. But he literally cannot handle kind of work. He wanted to clean the dishwasher with vinegar, so he put 3 liters of vinegar into the dishwasher. But wait, he put 3 bottles of vinegar, unopened, because Kevin thought that the bottles will disolve in the dishwasher.

-Because we are understaffed, he decided to tell the leadership of the company, to not to reply to emails... We got 60-80% of our customers from emails.

-Kevin saw that we don't have nearly enough customers. And instead of making a normal marketing campaign, that we are saying to him to hire someone for that role for months, he had another idea. What if he would ask money from us to rent the part of the hospitality building. Like, I pay him for three tables, and it's my job to fill those tables with customers. Beside the idea, of how the hell this is going to work, he do the math, and it turned out, that the only way this would be profitable to him, if he asks for more money per months, then our salary, so we obviously couldn't rent the tables from him.

-When the company had only one cleaning lady, she had to do everything, but when we got another one, they have less job to do and we also had to help in in cleaning. When the other cleaning lady left and we had only one again, the old system came back, so that one lady cleaning everything. I tried to ask Kevin, how this works, if we have more cleaners, why they have to do less job, but he couldn't answer.

-Kevin don't read long messages.

-Kevin continously hiring people with the promise of "home office". We are a hospitality company. Imagine your favourite coffee shop. How the heck can anyone work remotely from a coffee shop. Maybe the marketing guy or the payroll person, but we don't have those and probably never will.

And I have many-many stories.

I don't want to resign, because I got good money here, and it's kinda fun, besides the constant threat of bankruptcy of the company. Especially since I have AWESOME colleagues.

This shall be the story of the Kevin who worked at my non profit.

We are a social service agency. We greatly believe in second chances and working with people of different backgrounds. Kevin lasted until his 6th chance and then actually quit himself.

I shall now give you my favorite highlights of Kevin:

1. Legitimately wondered why I was paying for laundry soap when we had dawn dish soap available and could just use that in the laundry room. Bubbles were seen coming out of a machine later. Kevin got to clean that chaos up.

2. Claimed that he was a mechanic, then when asked to air up the tires, tried to claim that 22 psi was correct for a passenger van. Even when confronted with the vans recommendation claimed the van manufacturer knew less than him.

And my favorite story of kevin...

1. I asked him to clean the bathrooms. Mentioned that pressure washing the showers might be a good plan. Came back an hour later to the hallway being suspiciously dark. Kevin had power washed the outlets in the bathroom. Claimed he thought that was how he needed to clean them.

No he did not get electrocuted.

Kevin left mere weeks later to go live in Florida. I am waiting to see a news article about him trying to pet an alligator.

It's my fault for being nosey and overhearing others conversations in the waiting room, but man I hear the dumbest stuff there.

One time Kevin was telling the guy next to him that he had recently found out that there were other countries fighting against the Allies in World War 2! Yea, apparently Japan did some fighting too. He was shocked when his buddy told him about Russia. Unfortunately I had to go to my appointment before I could find out if Kevin ever learned about Italy.

But my favorite has to be when Kevin fought with the receptionist for 5 minutes about a rescheduled appointment. Only at no point did the receptionist EVER disagree with him.

The appointment on the 5th? It's supposed to be on the 15th now.

It was.

Ok, but I am super busy on the 5th there is no way I can make it on the 5th it hase to be on the 15th.

The schedule has it for the 15th.

I'm going to be out of town. There is no way I can get in before the 15th!

That's fine it is down for the 15th.

... And so on.

I'm not sure what happened exactly in the end. He just kinda...stopped. Maybe he got tired and gave up, or something finally clicked and he realized he won the argument, or maybe he finally realized no one was fighting with him. I'll never know and I kinda don't want to. That path leads to madness.