Real Documents
Here is a copy of a Letter of Appreciation I got in 1992 from ComTraPac for exemplary service in setting up a retirement ceremony. The whole story is a bit more complex. In 1992 I was assigned temporarily to base maintenance of the base that housed ComTraPac. Rather than just get bored, I looked for interesting things for Base Maintenance to do. Mostly because I found real things to do instead of make-work, the other temporary duty sailors worked harder than they ever had. One area that had been largely ignored was the ComTraPac offices, and they actually had some interesting things to do.
In another of those instances where the Navy's Department of Surprise Parties and Practical Jokes to really make my life interesting, I got a short notice cross-country transfer. The NCO in charge of Base Maintenance, a Boatswain's Mate on a base that was 98% Sonar Techs, had been getting a lot of positive notice during my time assigned to him, and he was a good guy. I figure he got word to ComTraPac that the guy who had driven the positive changes on their facilities was getting screwed and could use a positive bullet on his next evaluation. The command structure of the base I was assigned to was apparently institutionally incapable of recognizing positive effort that was not part of their permanent staff.
I bring this up as an example of a document from the early 1990s that was from a major command using their best word-processing equipment to produce a serialized document for the record.
Here is a document, allegedly twenty years older that is proportionately spaced. It is a forgery, and a bad one that the AP and CBS claimed to be valid. The letters are evenly mono-spaced, not proportionately spaced. If you look at the word "flight" you can clearly see that the letters f, l, and i are proportionately spaced. Nobody had equipment to produce this kind of document for regular personnel actions in 1972.
Attention to detail!
Hat Tip:
Powerline and
Citizen Smash
