in the navy

So my wife and I went to the Navy recruiter last night looking for information. What information you might ask? Well then I would answer, wow you are thick...anyway, we went to the Navy recruiter to get information on joining the Navy. Well, information on my wife joining the Navy that is. If you are an avid reader of my blog then you already know that my wife and I are planning on moving to Hawaii in about 2 years. We have both been casually looking at jobs and houses on our island of choice and she has found a few possibilities. She is currently in school for biology and was originally going the way of the Veterinarian but has recently been more interested in marine biology. She has found a few Navy based jobs down in Hawaii and one thing lead to another and we found ourselves talking to a Navy recruiter last night.

Of course their website was incorrect on a number of specifics about joining and being in the Navy, I chock that up to, they will say anything online to get you in the door. But there was one very important fact that their website got wrong, the location of the recruitment office. So if anyone plans on going to the office in downtown Providence it doesn’t exist. After finding the location, and paying $10 for parking, we walked down the street to the building and up to the front door. What caught me off guard was the police officer standing outside but I figured it was just a government building or something. Once we opened the door we were ushered to an airport style metal detector.

I again chocked the heightened security to it being a government building and began to empty my pockets into the bins provided on the conveyor belt. Just as I was getting to my shoes, yes even the shoes had to come off, one of the security guards asked us where we were headed. "Military recruiter." My wife chimed in. "Oh, they all moved." Responded the guard. When we asked where to, he had no idea. So, their office moved so recently that they didn't have time to update the website, or maybe they were just too lazy to update it, and they have no documentation with the address written down on it? That's the first thing I would have done so I can answer that question effectively, but I’m just good at customer service I guess. Just then another security guard piped in with the general location, a shopping plaza off Atwells Ave which even Google doesn't know yet. So we set the GPS in our phones for that general area and ended up driving around the large, confusing, and poorly laid out shopping plaza for a bit before finally finding the office.

When we entered the building my first thought was, “Yeah this doesn't look new at all, must have been laziness.” My next thought was "Hey they have a PS2 in here?" It was true, on the right as you walked in there was a PS2 with a bunch of games piled on top sitting next to a roughly 40 inch LCD. How do I get this kind of job. We were quickly greeted and ushered to a couple of empty chairs in front of a desk. The Navy guy quickly got into his questioning about why we were thinking of the Navy and what her goals were. I applaud him for not seeming rehearsed, but he did start to get a bit trying when he kept asking us if we wanted to talk about certain subjects. We came in for information, just tell us information. The surprisingly unprofessional aspect of this whole experience was that not only did the other recruiter working there keep answering his cell phone even while talking to another prospect, but when not talking on the phone he was swinging his new golf clubs right next to me, but I digress.

The more the recruiter talked, the more uninterested I became, and I found out later that my wife felt the same way. And I definitely couldn’t stand to see her go on deployment for 6-7 months every 2 years. The only benefit that would have worked for us was the pay. The military in general is very generous with their pay and provides a stipend for food and housing.Other than that, then Navy doesn’t appeal to us and wouldn’t allow us to reach our goal of living in and raising a family in Hawaii. With that news, our original plan is back in full swing. I just need to convince my wife that we have to stop going out to eat all the time and save every penny.