As I write this, on Friday morning, Danielle and I are waiting to find out what our next duty station will be. Danielle has already checked the website 5 or 6 times this morning.

We’re obviously both excited and nervous. It’s basically up to a stranger and some strange system to determine whether we go somewhere we’ve never been before or go back to a place we know, where we have friends.

I wrote a post earlier this year about the process of choosing our list of prospective billets, and, if anything, we’re more conflicted than ever about where we’re going next. In a way, it’s a good thing that someone else gets the final say in where we go.

We submitted our list of preferences about 6 weeks ago, and we were supposed to find out the first week of this month—then it got pushed back a week. I knew that somewhere mysterious decision-making machinery was churning out our future, but I was vague on the details. Did they spin a wheel on a cubicle wall somewhere? Did they throw darts? Roll dice? So Danielle explained the ‘ranking and stacking’ process to me while we ate breakfast, which, sort of, cleared things up.

The ’stacking’ comes first. The detailers look at the pool of people—in this case, about 30 officers—and stack them in groups according to the qualifications they’ve earned. There will be one group of candidates who have earned all the possible qualifications, another of those who have earned all but one, and so on.

Then comes the ‘ranking’ within each stack. For this they look at candidates’ fitness reports and assign a rank to each one. The rankings help determine whether they get their first, second, third … or tenth choice of the billets.

Then comes the Mysterious Detailer Voodoo. Using some combination of practicality and whimsy, they finalize the slate. A few examples: The DOD wants to avoid cross-country moves whenever possible because they’re expensive. The highest ranked people can’t all go to the West Coast. And every billet has to be filled, no matter where it is.

UPDATE: As I was revising this post, Danielle came in to tell me the release of the slate had been postponed for another week. I shouldn’t be surprised. This is the military we’re talking about, after all.