On Monday morning, the routing envelope arrived at the command suite. The aide who opened the pouch sorted the correspondence into piles, and the complaint went into the pile for the commander, because that was where the routing list said it belonged. The aide did not read it beyond the subject line. He placed it on top of the other papers in the pile, and he carried the pile into the commander's office, and he set it on the desk where the morning's work waited. The office was quiet, and the desert light came through the blinds in bars, and the envelope sat there with its list of offices on the front, each one initialed in turn. It had traveled from a kitchen table on Saddlebrook Drive to a counter at the family support center, through the civilian personnel office, past a senior administrator, and into the command suite, and every step had followed the rules. Nobody along the way had noticed the one fact that would have stopped the whole journey cold. The complaint was addressed, in the end, to the man it was about.
Pete came back from the staff meeting to find the morning pile on his desk. He worked through it the way he always did, top to bottom, signing what needed signing and setting aside what needed thought. The pile was ordinary: a training schedule, a maintenance report, a request for leave, a memo about the visiting inspection. Near the bottom of the pile was a routing envelope with a list of offices on the front, each one initialed in turn. Pete opened it without any particular curiosity and pulled out the complaint inside.
Life Stories
He read the first page standing up, and then he sat down. The complaint was about a truck in a driveway on Saddlebrook Drive. It described the truck as too big, too military-looking, and beneath the standards of the neighborhood. It said the owner had been asked politely to move it and had refused. It said the owner hid behind his uniform to ignore community standards. It was signed by Deborah Sanderson, president of the Saddlebrook Neighborhood Association, and it asked that the matter be taken up by the base commander. Pete read it twice, slowly, and then he set it on the desk and looked out the window at the flight line.
The irony of it did not make him laugh. He had expected the complaint, and he had known, in the abstract, that it would come to him, but seeing his own address and his own truck described in formal language on his own desk was different from expecting it. The woman who had written it worked three days a week in a building not far from this office, and she had filed it through a channel that was designed to carry complaints upward, and the channel had carried it all the way up to the man it was about. Every person who had touched it had done their job correctly. The clerk had logged it, the supervisor had checked it, the administrator had routed it, the aide had sorted it. The system had worked exactly as it was supposed to work, and the result was a complaint about the commander sitting on the commander's desk.
Pete thought about Deb for a while, and he tried to be fair to her in his own mind. She cared about her street, and she had spent years keeping it orderly, and she believed, honestly, that a big truck in a driveway was a problem worth solving. She was wrong about the truck, and she was wrong about the association's power over a private driveway, and she was wrong about the man she was writing about, but she was not lying about what she believed. Pete had dealt with people like her before, people who were certain and sincere and mistaken all at once, and he knew that the worst response was to answer certainty with rank. A commander who used his position to win a neighborhood argument would lose something larger than the argument, and Pete had no intention of losing it. He had seen commanders ruin good judgment by deciding their own cases, and he did not intend to join them.
He picked the complaint up again and read the last paragraph, where Deb asked the base commander to remind the service member of his obligations. Pete set the paper down and folded his hands on the desk. He knew what he could not do. He could not decide a complaint about himself, and he could not send it back down the channel with a note in his own hand, and he could not call Deb and explain the situation, because any of those moves would look like a commander handling his own case. He also knew what he could do, and it was the same thing he would have done for any complaint that touched him personally. He would hand it to someone else, untouched and undecided, and let that person judge it on its own merits.
The office was quiet around him. The phone did not ring, and the aide did not come in, and the desert light moved slowly across the floor. Pete opened his desk drawer and took out a clean folder, and he placed the complaint inside it, along with the routing envelope and the copy of the letter Deb had written on association letterhead. He closed the folder and laid it on the corner of the desk, separate from the rest of the morning pile. He did not write anything on it yet. The decision was made in his mind, but the paper that would carry it out belonged to the morning, and Pete wanted the wording to be right. He stood up, straightened his jacket, and went back to the work of the day, leaving the folder where it was, closed and waiting, on the corner of the desk.