The Joy of e-Qip

Second Draft. The first number drawn was 246, and was picked from the urn by Secretary of War Baker. (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)

Doing the paperwork required for a security investigation has always been horrible.  I recall in 1988, while I was stationed in Germany, filling out the paperwork.  I recall being asked questions about things I never knew about, nor, quite frankly, did I care.  But there it was, ‘Birth County’. Well, I was born in Wilmington, Delaware and I’ve not been there since I was four days old.  I recall that day clearly.  Not.  Now how in the heck, in the days before the internet, does one find out that information?  I can’t recall, but I believe it involved a trip to the library on post, calls to my parents back in the States and a lot of swearing.   Standard Form 86, that was the name of the form I had to fill out, even now I have nightmares about that experience.

Fast forward to 2010.  Now I’m considered a Federal Contractor and the Office of Personnel Management is the agency responsible for conducting my security investigation.  They have developed this really neat program called e-Qip, short for Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing.  Oh bliss.  I’m a stickler for detail and secure in my masculinity, so I read the instructions from front to back.  They plainly tell you type in this and do that. I think it’s meant to make men realize that if you don’t read the instructions you will fail.

The really neat thing about a security investigation is contacting members (and former members) of your family and asking for little details that never crossed your mind and were probably not pertinent.  My mother in law’s maiden name.  Ex-wife’s phone number. Best friend’s middle initial. They have this nasty little feature which checks your application form, a GUI database front-end and lists out where you made mistakes or left things out. Oh, it’s good. Darn good.  If I had a gap of one month between home addresses the system reached out and slapped me in the face.

Then in 2012 they introduce the new, IMPROVED, e-Qip.  Now they’ve actually made a few of the pages more intuitive, but in the meantime they’ve really created a nightmare.  This week I had to submit for a new investigation (don’t get me started why). The good news is that the system retained most of the information I’ve previously entered but left out really insidious details.  For my recommended contacts they deleted all the names.  Now, instead of a middle initial I had to fill in the entire middle name.  Now there is a space for a cell phone.  Sometimes it asks for a phone and I don’t know if I should fill in the home phone or work phone, I don’t know if the investigator will call during the day or the evening.  Now there is a space for email.  Same dilemma.

And there is a place for Selective Service Number and it asks me to fill in the blank.  What?  That’s the old draft which I had to register for when I turned 18 but I haven’t seen anything from then since then.  I spent 26 years in the Army after that, and not once did they ask for my Selective Service Number.   So I go to the Selective Service website (thank God for the internet) and call the toll-free number.  “We’re sorry, but our computers are down for maintenance.  Call back tomorrow”.  I call back the next day and try to stay awake through the phone menu.  It finally says to me:  ‘Write to the archives in St. Louis and ask for your Selective Service number.’  What?  This is 2013, I haven’t licked a stamp in about four years and I’d like to turn this form in during the next few days.  So I looked up the page and found a customer service email address and patiently ask if they can do a workaround.   I hear nothing for a few hours and think my email went into the bit bucket. I can only imagine an old lady in tennis shoes hitting the delete button, thinking “Men, don’t they ever read instructions?”  But lo and behold I receive a reply with not only my Selective Service Number but also the identification of my local board.  Wow…   I hope they survive the sequestration, talk about great customer service!

The new system has this really frustrating tendency to check your work every step of the way and at the end there is an overall validation step.  But don’t dare put a space in a telephone number, no parentheses, no hyphen, just numbers.  I actually feel bad for the investigator, it must hurt their eyes with no parentheses, spaces or hyphens.  There are also these damnable little boxes you must check no to, whenever it asks ‘do you have any more information to add’?  At one point I added the same job three times before I figured out to hit ‘no’, there was nothing else to share.

Great, I’m done!  My form validates, I have no errors and I’m ready to submit.  Oh joy!

Wait a second.  I’m reading the form and it says ‘don’t proceed past this point until you can print’.  Oh shoot.  I went paperless in my home about three years ago and have no printer.  I called up my security officer (he must really hate me by now) and ask what to do.  Voicemail.  Email, same thing.  I finally get a return call and he says the words I hate to hear.  ‘Go to a place from where you can print’. *argh* So tomorrow I’m heading down to Kinkos and accessing a computer there that can print (hopefully).  It’s worth it not having a printer taking up a ton of space on my desk.

If you’ve read this far you most likely have a security clearance and you know the joys of e-Qip.  If not, you’re lucky. As a former PM of a coding project, I think there is no way that e-Qip is CMMI compliant.  But every step of the way I thank my lucky stars for the internet.  Looking up a zip code is easy now.  Overall filling out the the form is quick and easy, I was done in three easy days of work.

Life is good.

Related articles

• Ugrent: Bill H.R.748, Call 18 to 24 Year Olds Into Forced Military Selective Service (fromthetrenchesworldreport.com)
• Vivalogue’s Publishing Services Selected Over Print-on-Demand (prweb.com)
• Featured Job: Field Investigator 1 (whnt.com)