About the
Webmaster
So you wanna know a little about me, eh? I'll try to make
it brief, but I may end up rambling on and on and on and.......you
get the idea.
I enlisted in the Army under the delayed entry program the
summer after my junior year of high school. I went to the
military entrance processing station(MEPS), did all the tests,
and picked my job(31F: Network Switching Systems Operator).
When I got home, I get a call from my recruiter with some
bad news. Apparently, they tested me positive for cocaine
on the urinalysis.
Now, I know that it was a mistake as I've never did cocaine.
I was thinking it wouldn't be too difficult to get them to
realize their mistake, but I was dead wrong. They test you
positive for drugs in the urinalysis and you won't be able
to enlist again for two years. I did some researching online,
asked some questions on message boards, and my hopes really
dropped...that's when I learned that they consider those test
results like the word of God.
That's when I started to really get steamed, as I know the
results were wrong but they wouldn't even consider re-testing
me. What made it even worse was the fact that I found several
sites that detailed how easy it was for a urinalysis test
to return a false positive...there's a whole slew of negatives
to the test. I really liked the fact that the urinalysis test
can only detect drugs a few days after use...so the people
actually doing drugs only have to stop their nasty habit a
few days and they'll be fine and dandy for the drug test....in
fact, only marijuana can be detected past a week after use.
I finally decided to write my congressman...and two weeks
later, I was in the clear. I could be wrong, but I believe
my congressman first called MEPS, then sent representatives
to MEPS to check out how they administered the urinalysis.....and
I guess they found out why I got a false positive. Unfortunately,
I never did receive any information on what they found...but
all I really cared about was proving my innocence, which I
finally did.
I had to go back to MEPS and do everything all over again,
but that was fine with me. I actually received a better job
than before; now I'm a 74B (Information Systems Operator).
Of course I did get hassled by one of the guys working at
MEPS; I guess some feathers got rustled when my congressman
looked into things:-)
I was once again in the delayed entry program, with orders
to ship to Fort Benning for basic training on July 29th, a
few months after high school graduation. While in the delayed
entry program, my recruiter and I got together and decided
to create a website for people joining the Army. I worked
on a site for a few months, and this site finally went online
in late December, 2002. It was nothing like it is today....let's
just say that I did a lot of tweaking and design changes until
I got the site looking the way I wanted it.
The traffic to this site has steadily grown, from a few hundred
unique visitors a month to the thousands and thousands we
now receive each month. Originally offering only a couple
of pages of content, we now offer countless pages of information
and resources and more content will continuously be added.
Why did I create this site, you ask? From my own experience
of joining the Army, I realized I should have armed myself
with more knowledge....like which job to choose, what the
process would be like, etc. When my recruiter came up with
the idea of making a site, I jumped on it because I wanted
to make sure other people went to the military entrance processing
station(MEPS) armed with knowledge.
Liked my rambling? You can also check out what I have to
say about basic training.
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