Every door at the Air Force Academy has a sign that says FPCON: ALPHA. It’s clearly very, very important. As best I can tell, it’s no different than the terror alert color code warnings. FPCON stands for “Force Protection Condition”. How do they come up with these things? I mean, what does that mean?? Is it really English?

Every Academy telephone has a pad of paper next to it on which you’re supposed to write down bomb threats. I don’t know that the academy has ever HAD a bomb threat. Our tax dollars at work.

At the training today, they passed around stacks of “AF” stickers to be added to badges, which apparently means “Air Field” access. Previously, if you didn’t have an AF on your badge, they printed a new badge with it on it. Now, a sticker is apparently acceptable. It’s one of those self-destructing stickers so that if you try to pull it off, it will tear. Only, it’s a plain blue square with black letters AF on it. I could make one look right with my laser printer no problem, why would I bother pulling one off a badge?

Being the military, they have to come up with stupid names for everything. Someone finally asked what a “Hard Gate” was in the training today. That means it has a padlock on it. As opposed to a cipher gate, which means that you can theoretically wave a pass card in front of it. Only, the cards they give us don’t have the RFID tags in them, so we have to swipe them anyway. And there’s other kinds of gates as well, but I don’t remember what they’re called.

The other side of this is that I get to enjoy the good side of the Air Force. The planes are all clean. They’re so well maintained, it’s hard to tell them apart. The mechanics are agonizingly painstakingly careful. No one flies a wide pattern. The radio calls are all concise and to the point.