{"id":591,"date":"2005-09-02T21:28:40","date_gmt":"2005-09-03T03:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nachzen.net\/?p=591"},"modified":"2008-02-05T20:16:38","modified_gmt":"2008-02-06T03:16:38","slug":"fpcon-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/?p=591","title":{"rendered":"FPCON: ALPHA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Every door at the Air Force Academy has a sign that says FPCON: ALPHA.  It&#8217;s clearly very, very important.  As best I can tell, it&#8217;s no different than the terror alert color code warnings.  FPCON stands for &#8220;Force Protection Condition&#8221;.  How do they come up with these things?  I mean, what does that <em>mean<\/em>??  Is it really English?<\/p>\n<p>Every Academy telephone has a pad of paper next to it on which you&#8217;re supposed to write down bomb threats.  I don&#8217;t know that the academy has ever HAD a bomb threat.  Our tax dollars at work.<\/p>\n<p>At the training today, they passed around stacks of &#8220;AF&#8221; stickers to be added to badges, which apparently means &#8220;Air Field&#8221; access.  Previously, if you didn&#8217;t have an AF on your badge, they printed a new badge with it on it.  Now, a sticker is apparently acceptable.  It&#8217;s one of those self-destructing stickers so that if you try to pull it off, it will tear.  Only, it&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>Being the military, they have to come up with stupid names for everything.  Someone finally asked what a &#8220;Hard Gate&#8221; 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&#8217;t have the RFID tags in them, so we have to swipe them anyway.  And there&#8217;s other kinds of gates as well, but I don&#8217;t remember what they&#8217;re called.<\/p>\n<p>The other side of this is that I get to enjoy the good side of the Air Force.  The planes are all clean.  They&#8217;re so well maintained, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every door at the Air Force Academy has a sign that says FPCON: ALPHA. It&#8217;s clearly very, very important. As best I can tell, it&#8217;s no different than the terror alert color code warnings. FPCON stands for &#8220;Force Protection Condition&#8221;. How do they come up with these things? I mean, what does that mean?? Is&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonclassified-nonsense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nachzen.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}