All Alone in the Night

For those who have been wondering what has happened to Zathras recently (yes, both of you), let me explain.

Zathras' master here in the Great Machine is a very demanding person. No matter how well, or how quickly Zathras performs his duties, it is never enough to satisfy him. Even when Zathras exceeds his requirements, or finishes faster than expected, he only sees that as justification to give Zathras more work, and less time to do it...

Stepping back out of character for a moment, I'll give you an example. Like another blogger on this site, I am in the Army. My current assignment is running part of a training site where we prepare Soldiers who are getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. We take our mission here very seriously, because each of us knows that the training we give these young men and women could literally be the difference between life and death.

Unfortunately, our dedication and success to date may come back to haunt us. Because we have been able to handle a truly phenomenal number of Soldiers in the past couple of years, and because the units we have trained have had very few casualties in theater, the Army has decided that we should train even more of the units getting ready to deploy! Of course, the fact that last year's training load stretched us to our limits on manpower and resources is irrelevant - so this year we are getting twice as many Soldiers to train. As of yet, no one has explained to me where the additional 30 trainers I need will come from, or lacking that, where I can get another 20 hours scheduled in each day.

As always, we'll do our best, and work until we drop, because we do believe in this mission. But sometimes I fear we may reach the end of human endurance, and I'm not sure what will happen then...

Every day, we do more and more, with less and less. Soon, we will be able to do everything with nothing.