When you're in the military you can learn how to do just about anything. If one of your shipmates doesn't know the answer, they're within six degrees of separation from a shipmate who does know.
However this system breaks down when it comes to military retirement. Those darn retirees are never around when you have a question, and if the military retiree has come back to work in your spaces as a contractor or a volunteer... well, if your workplace is the best place they can think of to hang out then you might not want to ask them your retirement questions.
But if you're a military retiree and you've ever had a VA or a Tricare question, the annual retired personnel seminars are a great one-stop way to find a roomful of people who know what to do. I've been retired over four years but I just attended our first seminar. Our Retired Activities Office holds one every November but this was the first time that I've actually been available and had questions to ask. I wasn't too thrilled about having to be there by 7:30 AM but they had free coffee & fruit. As a youngster of 46 I dragged the room's average age down by at least a decade. Only one other attendee even looked like he was below 50.
Usually the seminars are held in a big conference room on base, but this year the coordinator screwed up and invited a politician as keynote speaker. Our congressional representative must've leaped at the chance to speak to a bunch of veterans three days before the mid-term elections, but last March when our coordinator sent the invitation he wasn't thinking about the significance of the first weekend in November. So the base admiral had to kick the whole affair off-base to avoid a political foodfight and we ended up at a local veteran's center. Not worth the effort-- Abercrombie's 30 minutes didn't improve the four-hour schedule.
I didn't learn much from the healthcare or the VA briefs, either, and the commissary/exchange reps didn't have anything new. But the coordinator filled an entire room with tables full of handouts from all of those activities along with free coffee mugs & door prizes. I was able to pick up a free VA benefits guide and a 2006 military almanac that would've taken a while to find over the Internet. After the VA & Tricare reps spoke I caught up with them at the coffeepot, asked them my specific personal questions, and got detailed answers. I didn't have to figure out who to talk to or spend hours playing phone tag-- that alone was worth four early-morning hours on a Saturday.
IMO the best part of the conference was the ~125 attendees. There were a couple canes & walkers but they were all in pretty good shape. I estimated approximately three millennia of cumulative military experience ranging all the way back to the 1930s. They were all pretty uninhibited about expressing themselves-- one of them actually heckled Abercrombie. When another of the speakers (maybe 25 years old) claimed that the exchanges didn't have lines because the cashiers always opened more registers, some of the more "senior" attendees shouted him down and almost drove him out of the room. Another one pointed out that the stores shouldn't start selling their holiday bargain merchandise on 15 October if they only have a 45-day return limit that falls a month short of Christmas morning. That had never even occurred to me but she got a round of applause from the rest of the room.
Just about every 70-something in the audience had a cell phone. They had it turned up to max volume, couldn't hear it ringing, didn't realize it was theirs until the rest of the audience yelled at them, and then fumbled with it endlessly trying to turn it off (while putting on their reading glasses to do so) as the other 70-somethings heckled them. It was a pretty scary glimpse of the way our future could turn out. (It also made some good points for cell phone designers.) I think I'll wait another five or ten years before I attend my next seminar...
However this system breaks down when it comes to military retirement. Those darn retirees are never around when you have a question, and if the military retiree has come back to work in your spaces as a contractor or a volunteer... well, if your workplace is the best place they can think of to hang out then you might not want to ask them your retirement questions.
But if you're a military retiree and you've ever had a VA or a Tricare question, the annual retired personnel seminars are a great one-stop way to find a roomful of people who know what to do. I've been retired over four years but I just attended our first seminar. Our Retired Activities Office holds one every November but this was the first time that I've actually been available and had questions to ask. I wasn't too thrilled about having to be there by 7:30 AM but they had free coffee & fruit. As a youngster of 46 I dragged the room's average age down by at least a decade. Only one other attendee even looked like he was below 50.
Usually the seminars are held in a big conference room on base, but this year the coordinator screwed up and invited a politician as keynote speaker. Our congressional representative must've leaped at the chance to speak to a bunch of veterans three days before the mid-term elections, but last March when our coordinator sent the invitation he wasn't thinking about the significance of the first weekend in November. So the base admiral had to kick the whole affair off-base to avoid a political foodfight and we ended up at a local veteran's center. Not worth the effort-- Abercrombie's 30 minutes didn't improve the four-hour schedule.
I didn't learn much from the healthcare or the VA briefs, either, and the commissary/exchange reps didn't have anything new. But the coordinator filled an entire room with tables full of handouts from all of those activities along with free coffee mugs & door prizes. I was able to pick up a free VA benefits guide and a 2006 military almanac that would've taken a while to find over the Internet. After the VA & Tricare reps spoke I caught up with them at the coffeepot, asked them my specific personal questions, and got detailed answers. I didn't have to figure out who to talk to or spend hours playing phone tag-- that alone was worth four early-morning hours on a Saturday.
IMO the best part of the conference was the ~125 attendees. There were a couple canes & walkers but they were all in pretty good shape. I estimated approximately three millennia of cumulative military experience ranging all the way back to the 1930s. They were all pretty uninhibited about expressing themselves-- one of them actually heckled Abercrombie. When another of the speakers (maybe 25 years old) claimed that the exchanges didn't have lines because the cashiers always opened more registers, some of the more "senior" attendees shouted him down and almost drove him out of the room. Another one pointed out that the stores shouldn't start selling their holiday bargain merchandise on 15 October if they only have a 45-day return limit that falls a month short of Christmas morning. That had never even occurred to me but she got a round of applause from the rest of the room.
Just about every 70-something in the audience had a cell phone. They had it turned up to max volume, couldn't hear it ringing, didn't realize it was theirs until the rest of the audience yelled at them, and then fumbled with it endlessly trying to turn it off (while putting on their reading glasses to do so) as the other 70-somethings heckled them. It was a pretty scary glimpse of the way our future could turn out. (It also made some good points for cell phone designers.) I think I'll wait another five or ten years before I attend my next seminar...
