Yellow Ribbon Event

Yesterday, Brady was required to attend a pre-deployment Yellow Ribbon Event for soldiers (or warriors as they kept calling them) and families.  I feel extremely sorry for the head presenter because I could tell she tried to put on a great event and in many ways reminded me of my personality while teaching.  Unfortunately, there were many things that could definitely improve.

First of all, the day began with a promotional video about how honorable it is to be in the National Guard and how honorable it is to be chosen to deploy.  Anyone who has been around for a few years knows that they will take any and everyone they can so it was a bit of a farce.  Then, the video shares the story of a mother who is so proud of her son who was killed in action while on deployment.  Yes, you read that correctly.  At a pre-deployment family event, they thought it was a smart idea to show a video that included the story of a soldier DYING.  There were many children in the room at this time.  I'm still mad at myself that I forgot to mention this on the comment card distributed at the end.  How could I forget the most stupid thing of the day????

Next, they separated the families and the soldiers.  The families took part in a Q&A session where a moderator ran around the room with a microphone to get questions and then ran back at the front for someone to answer them.  All the while, a screen was up with contact information for people not presenting/answering questions.  I immediately thought of at least 2 options for how to make this session more efficient.  My first thought was to have them choose a twitter hashtag and have people tweet questions.  They could have it up on the screen instead of the unrelated contact info.  The other option is to create a Today's Meet room or a Poll Everywhere poll and have people text their questions fro their phones.  The inefficiency was so bad that they had to delay lunch because they felt they hadn't been able to answer enough questions in the allotted time.  While the inefficiency was annoying, I did still learn some useful information like the fact that they should have access to wifi (though they likely will have to pay for it) and that many soldiers take smartphones and ipads to Skype or FaceTime with families over wifi.  iMessage also works over wifi there.  So family, if you don't have an iPhone, iTouch or iPad, you may want to invest if you want to easily message Brady over there.

Additionally, they kept having important contacts say/spell out their information.  They should have given us a detailed handout with all the pertinent information.  I did not know what I needed to write down and only wrote down some of it.  They later handed out a huge contact sheet, but none of the ones they said we needed to keep on hand were on this list.  Supposedly they have been doing these Yellow Ribbon events for years... This is the first I've ever heard of since being with Brady, and he said he's never been to one before either.

Then, in the afternoon, we were separated yet again.  Brady snuck over to see me at one point because they were trying to make the soldiers "share their feelings" and Brady doesn't do well with those situations.  I had the pleasure of hearing all the vendors present and did learn one useful thing: the phone number for the Red Cross in case there's an emergency over here while he's away.

I could not even tell you the point of the last session.  I was so checked out by this point that I was merely playing on my phone... AS WAS EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM.

Finally, it was too long.  They could have covered everything in a morning and saved a lot of time.  As it was Brady's birthday, it was frustrating to be stuck there from 9am-3:30pm.  By the last session, everyone on the room was playing on either a phone or an iPad, tuning out the presentation which involved MANY random video clips from movies or famous YouTube videos.  Why was this necessary?  As I said, I don't even know what the point of this session was.

I know some other people were irritated about the peppiness of the presenter.  She did keep trying to sell to us that this was such an awesome time and what a great honor it is to serve our country.  While I respect that, I think everyone would have respected her more had she acknowledged to the family members that this sucks; that this is a very hard time and that no one wants to go through this.  Had she done that, she would have been more relatable.  As a soldier herself, none of us felt she knew what we were feeling.  She's on the other side, not ours.  Perhaps it would have been better to have someone on our side of the game leading.

XOXO,