I have a confession: When I was an Army E-6, the platoon sergeant tod me to send my entire 14 person team up to a detail to pick up litter. I told him they were busy using glass cleaner to clean fiber optic cable as preventive maintenance.

He totally bought it. 1/ https://twitter.com/wimremes/status/1253578700811120640">https://twitter.com/wimremes/...

Unfortunately, he briefed *HIS* new preventive maintenance process to the commander, who asked for data on how this was helping. I had just written some simple watchdog scripts to restart some of problematic processes automatically, so uptime was ACTUALLY better. 2/

I gave them those numbers and even noted that a young E-4 was the brains behind the whole operation. TBF, he had literally saved someone& #39;s life the month before with a good catch, but got squat all for it.

The Battalion Commander heard about the enhanced mission readiness. 3/

I then had to write up an award recommendation for this E-4 to get a medal for enhancing mission readiness by cleaning fiber optic cable with glass cleaner. I of course was as vague as humanly possible because this had gotten WAY out of control & this was an official document. 4/

So now there& #39;s some soldier running around with an Army Achievement Medal for creating fake preventive maintenance that is now ACTUAL scheduled preventive maintenance that I hope nobody is actually performing.

For reference, the "maintenance" involved cleaning the connectors. 5/

This whole situation with stupid and harmful coronavirus treatments reminds me of this story from 2001: creating hair-brained "ways to help" can often do more harm than good, consumes lots of mission cycles and gets out of hand FAST. /FIN