One difficulty for the aspiring Armory Custodian in the US Marine Corps was the training of job duties and what the ultimate source of truth was. When I first started my assignment in the Armory, I conducted a “handover” with the outgoing custodian over a roughly two month period. The handover was essentially the transfer of tribal knowledge and tips and tricks of how the previous person conducted their duties. There was no formal training and the regulations governing the operation of a Marine armory were buried in thousands of pages of technical manuals and orders.
Throughout my career I have always questioned the why and the thought behind the why as to how things around us work. This was no different in the armory and I often found myself wondering if a process existed simply because that’s how the last person did it. There had to be a better way. Someone had to have deducted this process from some “higher power”. Over the course of 16 months, I researched, planned, and authored a 42 page handbook outlining everything I had learned in my role as a US Marine Corps Armory Custodian.