Back in the mid to late 2000’s, I worked at a MDA site in Colorado Springs and one of the main executives was this West Point ring knocker who retired as an Army Colonel. The guy was so full of himself. When he took over originally as a commander, he had a couple of sysadmins fired and escorted off the base for daring to wear blue jeans to work ! Afterward, he issued an edict that no one was to wear blue jeans to the building, period. This included evenings, nights and weekends. If you close to this ring knocker in some kind of capacity, not only was blue jeans off limits but you better be wearing a long sleeve button down shirt. Short sleeve was unacceptable.
One other item, in conjunction with the base, he instituted a highway safety phone line where you can report anyone’s driving and if the driving was unsafe, you were called in for a meeting with the base commander and the ring knocker if you worked in his group. However, it was discontinued after several years and before my time.
He wasted a lot of money on a lot of aesthetic items for the building like glass doors which easily broke during wind storms. Fancy water fountains and tiling. For the building’s cafeteria, he even dictated the prices charged for food and drinks and insisted on sales tax being charged even though sales taxes are not normally charged on military bases. Even with all of the money wasted on making the facility fancy, it was routine for the bathrooms to be shutdown for maintenance issues. Even with the bathrooms shutdown, you better not wander off too far to use a different one.
Luckily in my position, I worked for the USAF and had nothing to do with ring knocker so I wore blue jeans everyday. The AF guys didn’t exactly like this ring knocker either. On my last day working there, when I out-processed, I had to take my paperwork to Pass and ID across the base, turn in my badge then I had to go back to the building to turn in a piece of paper and parking was horrendous. I parked in the ring knocker’s protocol parking spots. There were like 30 of them right by the building to enter the base and were empty just about all the time. That day I also had cutoff shorts and sandals on.
What I understood, this ring knocker was one of General O’Reilly’s favored boys too.
Oh, one of the ring knocker’s favorite things to do was like on a Thu afternoon or Fri morning call for a mandatory meeting like at 4pm on Fri afternoon and then half of the time, he cancels it or shows up late.
I was line division officer as my first job in my first squadron. The CO made my men go out every evening and “dress down” the propellers on all nine of our P-3 aircraft so that the four prop blades boxed the compass. These bastards were huge and heavy and it made me laugh that the CO was such a dick. We would have followed him exactly nowhere.