Inspection
Outwardly, you feel very put together today in your freshly pressed blues – your hair pulled back smoothly into a tight bun, face made up like a Saturday night on the St. Mary’s Strip , rather than for this unostentatious Friday morning. Yet you feel anxious and out of place. Nobody else is wearing them. Their drab uniforms of gray and olive make you a gleaming cornflower blooming over the ragweed. You asked when you first got in, “Did MSgt Miller tell you to wear blues today? No?” And still you haven’t seen him. ‘Strange,’ you say to yourself. He is usually among the first to greet you in the morning, and you can sometimes sense his glances from the opposite side hall. Usually, he makes his presence very known to you. You glance at the computer clock and see that it is nearly noon. ‘Even stranger,’ you begin to wonder, ‘he said just yesterday that he wanted to meet me in the conference room in 15 minutes, and that my blues better look perfect, but I haven’t seen him. Maybe he’s in there now, meeting with the commander or someone else?’