Can Hardly Wait

It’s been barely two days since we submitted a request to the National Personnel Records Center for Frank Stevens’ military records from his pre-1950 service in the Navy. Although we were warned up front about the length of time a response will take, I’ve already noted how trigger-happy their auto-responder seems to be.

And we’ve just received another auto-generated message, once again warning us that things could be a while:

The average response time on the majority of these types of requests is three to four weeks, however, on occasion a greater response time may be experienced. We service approximately 20,000 requests each week and are working earnestly and successfully at reducing our response time.  Our goal is to reduce our response time on these types of requests to ten days or less.

Polite, too, I might add:

Thank you for submitting a request to the National Personnel Records Center.

Whether the National Personnel Records Center manages to compress their response time to that mere ten days or not, I’m beginning to take a shine to that auto-responder. If nothing else, he seems to be a rather nice bot.