Week 9 of Training: FAST Backup Communications

I should start off by saying, while this is the course title pulled from the FSI catalog, I think they called it something else when we were in it. Anyway, this week was fairly general, if still important. We touched on the organization of Information Resource Management at post (the various position titles and their functions), processing the Diplomatic Pouch, how to destroy things at post and some basic security principals. Sadly there was a lot of review in this class from things we'd learned in previous classes. I think this is because these classes are all offered individually, not exclusively in our core training.

Anyway, we did get another field trip to break up the week and we got to learn how to smash computer-y things! What could be better than that?! A brief note on the picture: This actually isn't considered effective for destroying a hard drive... you have to degauss it first. Of course, I wouldn't want to do this to my own hard drives and expect to be able to recover anything worthwhile.

Field Trip to the Diplomatic Pouch Warehouse!

As part of DoS applied systems, we had the fantastic opportunity to go on a handful of field trips to see local facilities that support us while we're overseas.

By far the most interesting was our trip to the diplomatic pouch facility. The diplomatic pouch is the service that handles all official (and some unofficial) mail handling to our overseas posts. In addition, it provides an address in the DC area that people can send letters and packages to using domestic rates. This turns out to be a lot of mail to sling around. 

Having never been to a mail processing facility before, it was quite entertaining to see the process involved. Even more interesting were the safety procedures to check incoming mail for threats (bombs, anthrax, et cetera). These processes aren't much (or possibly any) different than those taken by the USPS, but having never seen anything like it, it was quite the experience. 

Anyway, we also got a chance to learn the difference between Army Post Offices (APO), Diplomatic Post Offices (DPO), and the Diplomatic Pouch. It was nice to see how my future mail will be handled, since Chennai is a 'Pouch only' post, so all my mail (and more importantly, Amazon packages) will be going through there for the next couple years.

A bunch of mail!