The Man You Disliked Over His Job, by GuerrillaLogistician

“We have a problem, gentleman, and like normal, it’s the lack of supplies,” Alfred told the small group you were sitting with. This time, instead of trigger pullers, there were a few individuals that you would consider nerds before things went to hell sitting at the table. These guys wrote articles about electronics that helped prevent you from dying. Before everything went to hell, you would read about their articles on American Partisan, but now worn-out little folders of paper stapled like mini-training books were handed out. The papers were stained with coffee rings, pages dog-eared, marked up, and even notes added as they moved throughout your small groups during training. While that information had been given to the common man, who could follow the instructions, not everyone did. Many people sat around reading articles and ignored them or saved the information on a protected computer without actually trying to do what they had seen.

Alfred continued, “As you know, we are extremely short on tablets, and I don’t want to risk our teams having to go to voice communications.” “I know how we have been tacking voice comms with the TinySAUltra easily these days, and I don’t want our teams dealing with that.” “We have recruited some exceptional individuals you must protect for this operation.” Alfred handed out some sheets of paper to everyone as he continued, “The big problem here is most of these guys don’t trust you because of how shitty you treated them initially, and these guys were more prepared than you were.”

Alfred was probably correct; all those people you despised before the fall and were repeatedly mocked in books were the first ones you pointed out and ridiculed as supplies got tight. You didn’t have all the supplies you needed either, and no one could be as flush with supplies as Amazon and a well-stocked grocery chain, even if they actually were finite in the end. When these guys showed up, and you asked them their profession out of hand, you almost tossed them all away even though some of these guys could shoot better than you and understood how to make barrels, but because their primary job was sales, you just thought of them as another car dealer. Mind you, these guys brought many supplies, meaning they were prepping all along, but once you heard the profession, it was as if your logic shut off and emotions took over your thoughts.

Now, your little community was short the vital technology that prevented you from being smoked like so many Ukrainian and Russian soldiers had been during the start of that horrible war. Some of these guys had more trigger time on HF than you had before the fall of society, and if it weren’t for more intelligent people than you asking the right questions, you might have turned these guys away.

In front of you, set a paper with the name of the operative you must protect, and you know exactly who he is. You also know the big guy across from you was coming along because he was the actual knowledge base. He could ensure the tablets were in good working order. The real problem was that none of you at the table would stand a chance of having a fair trade. The guy you would deal with was known as an absolute pain to work with, but he always had what you wanted, even though the cost often seemed more like a deal with the devil than with a person.

While you had been training and typing and ridiculing politicians, these guys had been in meat space talking to other people getting to know them and how to come out with a fair deal. They could make sure that a fair deal also meant you weren’t getting screwed half to death by shady individuals. You knew your backup tablet was already your primary tablet; an Anti-pattern had been the one that fixed that tablet up for you, but without him and that tablet, how long would you have survived? Would it have been months now, or would it have only been days?

You sat there staring at your tiny printout, the route you were supposed to take, the pace plan, when you were supposed to do your ANGUS report, and the comms window for the CYRIL report. Alfred reviewed all the waypoints and plans as you guys walked through the planning tweaking things as necessary.

You knew you were in charge of a team because you were skilled at what you did, but you were a team leader because you had specific skills others didn’t. You weren’t the worst leader, and you weren’t the best leader, but you were a good leader. Realistically, you couldn’t lead somebody instantaneously; they had to get to know you and trust you. This guy could create trust out of thin air. This guy you mocked, ridiculed, and thought of as below you and incapable was now probably the only person that could keep your unit alive, and you sat there talking about him in hushed whispers crapping on this man for his previous profession. Just like a handful of the good politicians, you just lumped everyone together and said they’re all evil, and many of them probably were, but there were always a few locals that would work for you, and you out of hand ignore them. You wouldn’t support them when they were doing well for you, and you didn’t care about what they did until things didn’t go how you wished they would. While politicians were straight in our faces, we would check mark a box for one party or the other; we often just labeled these guys as filth. At the same time, they made the deals and the compromises to prevent the inevitable from happening earlier and give your children a fighting chance.

This guy you were supposed to protect was even lower than a politician in your eyes; he was the guy that sold you crap you didn’t need at a price you shouldn’t have paid. At least that’s how you thought, but this guy had gotten supplies you would never have had before, from water purification systems for your team to more radios that were better than a Baofeng. Even if some cables had to be modified, these were far more rugged. The worst part is that these radios would have cost you a small fortune before the fall, and he had made a deal to trade for stuff you had excess of. You wouldn’t have thought about doing this deal, but he walked up to Alfred and asked if we had extra supplies of a particular type and what he would get in return. Alfred gave their approval as the acting leader and discussed it with the logistics guy. You never would have even thought of doing that kind of trade like he did because, at the time, you had radios that worked.

Now you had better radios, and your baofeng was a backup that may even help you expand a group of men into another capable team. You didn’t talk to anyone you weren’t buying from when you went to the open-air market, but he did, and the little things that made your life so much easier or survival possible just magically appeared without you doing any work.
Alfred wrapped up the whole brief, and it was fairly straightforward. The operation was simple: travel from point A to B to C, return, protecting the two assets the whole time. Their job was far more complicated. They had to inspect the goods, negotiate a fair price with the precious silver you were about to take out, and come back with a handful of tablets and other small goods to sustain operations.

You were going to be traveling a good distance and burning a lot of fuel, and you know, with the rationing going on, it was always difficult to get fuel for the vehicles. Somehow though, when your asset was with you, it was just a little bit cheaper and a little bit easier to get fuel, and every time you watched him work, you realized he wasn’t screwing the other guy. He was coming to a fair deal. The worst part was you would never tell this man how fucking terrible you spoke behind his back because you knew this was an area of knowledge and skill you had no capability in. It hurts your pride every day to realize that you hadn’t spent any time working on the social abilities this man had mastered over the years. You thought all your time in the military and