If you can't get back from the field before your timeline is expired..... you don't get back to base.

This means you spend the night out in the field, hopefully in the sardine packed bunk room at a Launch Control Facility. If you luck out, you might even get there in time to get a meal while the cook is awake. Sometimes you aren't so lucky, and the weather doesn't play nice. There has been more than a few instances of teams being stranded at silos by blizzards, sleeping in vehicles until snowplows get through. To add insult to injury, under guidelines followed by Job Control, if you are stuck out overnight, you become an unscheduled 'available' team the next day, with an all new 16 hour timeline - if you were scheduled to have the day off, you could find yourself working through the whole thing, and even have the chance of a 'RON' again! Fortunately, that was uncommon.

So you try to do all you can to make sure the day goes as smooth as possible, to make sure you don't Remain Over Night (RON) in the field. And there are a zillion things to go wrong:

• EQUIPMENT- If you fail to take along all your needed parts or tools, or if they are in poor condition (a common occurance), you could be stuck waiting for hours while a courier called 'standby driver' hunts down what you need and then drives it out to you. You would think that working on a system literally involving Rocket Science that you'd have cutting edge equipment, but that's hardly the case. What you actually have is an odd mixture of damned-if-you-scratch-it new and beaten-to-death old. Virtually all parts and specialized test equipment are decades old and have been 'refurbished' hundreds of times - sometimes items require a 'field reset' to work - a maintenace term for a smack or a kick to jar things into operation. Failing to carefully inspect things before you leave could cost you valuable time, not to mention possible damage, injury or death in the case of some critical items.

• BRIEFINGS- As a standard, a maintenance team is alloted 2 hours to gather all the things, included information, that they need prior to leaving base for the worksite. Any time you can cut off that is time you have to work, and get home. This also goes for when you arrive back at base, where you have to debrief, fill out paperwork, order any needed parts, etc., all before your 16 hour timeline is up. Good teams will often work to get this stuff done as quick as possible, but changing weather, security situations, and other issues can bog you down with lots of extra time-consuming briefings.

• SECURITY- One place a good team can make up lots of time is with their security escort. Often they require extra transportation to pick up weapons at the armory, or get personal equipment for the dispatch, and have to wait for someone to be available in their section to drive them. Sometimes, you will see maintenance teams who are on a poor footing with their escorts and do little to assist them. Security personnel often have little technical background and are affectionately nicknamed 'chocks', after the wooden blocks required in military vehicles that are good for chocking the wheels to keep the truck from rolling away when parked, but little else. However, you will ALSO see teams that think of their guards as 'chocks' spending a lot dispatches that last all day, or RON in the field. teams that treat their escorts well and help when they can often find those same guys helping to load equipment, pulling in favors from Field Security Controllers to expedite relief requests, and a host of other time-saving benefits.

• MICROMANAGEMENT- Military maintenance life has two dreaded time-robbing scourges - micromanaging supervisors, and Quality Inspectors. The latter is a necessary evil, especially when something as critical as nuclear weapons is involved. The former is usually somewhere between an unneeded nuisance to a full-blown pain in the ass. In either case, being stuck with an inspector or supervisor breathing down your neck while you work slows you down immensely, if only because you can get in serious trouble for failing to ensure said pain-in-the-ass saw every step you performed. If he looks away or sneezes and missed something, then it was never done, whether you did it or not, and you will be skewered on the evaluation report accordingly.

• VEHICLES- This is a favorite subject of most maintenance teams, not to mention security guys, missile crews, or anyone else stuck driving the long miles back and forth to the silos and Launch Control Centers. The vehicles used for transportation see a lot of drivers, a lot of miles, a lots of very bad roads, and a lot of awful weather. They don't get replaced often, and when they do, budgets for the squadron usually insist they have some feature that often makes you sorry you don't have the old truck they retired. You are required to inspect your assigned vehicle for any damage or bad equipment before dispatch, and motor pool inspects it when you get back, often with ridiculous criticality. Even so, fatigued or abused parts get missed, resulting in teams getting stranded, delayed, and even endangered in the course of a dispatch. Every team has stories about the vehicle that had no heat during a 2 hour blizzard drive, drove home by moonlight with all the lights inoperative, or similar hair-raising events.