My Own Private Hell; or, Tedium and Minutiae

Last spring I set to filling out the paperwork for my our first paid tickets back to visit family, a perk and reward of fulfilling the first full year of my contract.

Many weeks of swapping emails with people in the States, many hours of phone calls on hold (paying 10 cents a minute), many hand-wringing moments later, I had our orders and tickets to go back home. The actual email confirmation came less than 48 hours before we were set to travel. Talk about nerve wracking!

And now I am paying the price for those lovely tickets back home in the form of The Travel Voucher, also known as My Own Private Hell.

In all fairness, it's not just my private hell. Oh no, it's the hell all civilians navigating the World's Largest Bureaucracy get the pleasure to go through.

As a military wife and dependent, I had no idea what goes into travel. And most military people don't have to go through the craziness us civilians go through, either. When you are in the military, you make an appointment and someone types up your orders for you. Your travel arrangements are made through a travel office. You don't have to worry about keeping up with a stack of receipts and exact records in order to get reimbursed for portions of the travel.

And there are the forms---dear God, the forms are killing me. Codes for everything, lots of scary blanks, and a very vague set of directions to guide you.

Remember that obnoxious commercial for a credit card that went something like this:

•           4 round trip tickets =  $1000 
•           1 rental car for 3 weeks = $600
•           Seeing your family for the first time in over a year? Priceless

Oh, if it were just that easy. . . 

Know what else is priceless? Knowing "your" from "you're." Seriously. . . 

There is a definite cost to travel back, with so much that is not reimbursable. That which is requires you to fill out the form EXACTLY how they want. It's almost a joke because you know it's going to get kicked back to you at least twice before you get any of your expenses reimbursed. 

I'm not usually a conspiracy junkie, but I really do think the whole purpose of this experience is so you give up, thus letting the government keep those nickels and dimes for themselves. 

The travel voucher is technically supposed to be filled out within five days of our return, but like most of my coworkers, I've put it off because I know I have five years to fill it out. I've started and stopped the process several times since I returned in early August, and although I'd love to have that money in my pocket, the thought of filling out this form three times (once for every leg of the trip---an extra bonus for traveling separately for parts of the trip) makes me put off today what I can do tomorrow. In fact, I'm still trying to get reimbursed for portions of our Oct. 2012 move here. 

I complained to a coworker last year that we don't have anyone guiding us through the process like our military personnel have. 

He chuckled and unsympathetically said, "Um, we all have degrees, and most of us have at least one master's degree. I think they figure we can fill out a form without assistance." 

Maybe so, but I disagree. I don't have a Master in Tedium and Minutiae Degree, and although I like to think I'm a details person (I love writing library catalog records, filling out accounting forms, and working formulas in spreadsheets), I can't for the life of me figure out how to get these forms right the first time. 

After three hours tonight, I think the government won this round. However, I'm up for another fight, another round of filling out forms from hell, and hopefully I won't be two years getting my nickels and dimes this time around.