Government Travel Card

Although "everyone" is supposed to have one, I somehow survived my time in the Army without a travel card.  In fact, Josh did too - until now.  We finally agreed to get one because he's supposed to use that (as opposed to a personal credit card) when he's conducting his regional travel.  I'm guessing it's all in an aim to prevent people from going into debt while conducting lots of international travel.  But the real reason we got it was to solve a rather simple problem made infinitely more complex by the Army (but... that's probably not very specific).

Because we are not flying out of a local airport when we start our PCS (we're heading east to visit people), the transportation office here cannot - I repeat cannot - just issue us tickets.  We must instead purchase the tickets up front and wait to be reimbursed on the back side.  We "could" do this with our personal credit card.  But with fully-refundable one-way tickets to Dhaka, that will likely get pricey.   So then we hear about this great travel card PCS program whereby they open a PCS "window" and you can rack up expenses on your GTC without having to pay them back until after the government pays you for your moving expenses.  Sounds like a great plan, right?  But, you have to get the card limit raised.  And, oh by the way, you also have to somehow convince them to open your PCS window before you leave POM even though you're not PCSing for another 45 days.  <sigh>  So Josh went to talk to them, and sure enough, even though there's this great PCS program, we were told that they would not approve any card limit increase (so we can't even afford to put one ticket on the card, much less 4) and really, the card office here exists just so that they can open accounts for people - not actually do anything.  I'm not kidding.  That's what they said.  Okay, so I changed the wording a bit.  But only a little.

Anyone who knew me when I was in the Army will tell you that I'm a bit of a stickler about making people do their jobs.  I mean, I have to do mine, why don't they have to do theirs??  I'm also a bit of a pain about making systems work the way they're supposed to.  It's the logistician in me.  If there's a system, and it's broken, someone needs to fix it.  We don't all need to reorganize our lives and put our personal financial well-being in jeopardy just because someone else is too lazy to do some paperwork (that they're getting paid to do I might add).  So while I'm gearing up for battle, Josh is totally willing to just let it go and charge this on our personal card.  Could we do that?  Sure.  Does it go against everything I believe in?  Absolutely.

 So I guess we'll see what happens.