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Can't Handle It! Once I had a student fail his preliminary electric plant operations practical. In 3 years, I only saw that happened once. Of course, he would be the student assigned to me. I'm sitting in my office when my student comes in with his face extremely red and tears running down his face. I ask him what's wrong and he explains that he failed his EPTEX. Of course, the first question I ask is "How?" He tells me that he didn't know what to do. Keep in mind that this is after over a year of training leading up to this point. "Well, you knew it was coming up, had several lectures that covered the material, and were told to sit in the hands-on trainer until you felt comfortable. What happened?" "I don't know, I just sat there until they made me leave." "Did you.. uh.. do anything?" "No, they tried to tell me what to do but I just couldn't do anything so I sat there." At this point, he's crying again. I guess being hand-held through how to turn a knob or switch was too stressful to the point that he locked up. I asked him what the plan was from here. He tells me that he's scheduled to have training watch with me tomorrow on the roving electrician watchstation. I give him a list of things to study so he'll be well prepared and he goes on his way, still a mess. The next day I get in to work to find out that my student went down to medical and told the doc that he was going to drive his car into a tree. He spent a week under observation and then the next two months handwaxing floors on all of the barges before they sent him to the fleet without an NEC. This is called "going sad" and is one of the only ways to get out of nuke school. And then I realized I was saying oh poo poo MM3 White (namechanged) was something of a shitshow. In a particularly unimpressive class, he was lagging behind other students. It wasn't to the point that we were particularly concerned that he wouldn't graduate but it required a little extra effort on our part to keep him on track. White had the usual disciplinary problems. Showing up late, uniform problems, whatever. One day a staff member finds him sleeping in his car at a very odd hour. We discover that he was thrown out of his new place for stealing and he has a grand total of 53 cents to his name. How did he end up living out of his car? Well, he managed to spend the entirety of his bank account taking a local girl to Disney and buying her season passes. That's what he tells us. Asking him roommates, they tell us that not only is he broke, he's been stealing from other students and pawning it. This will not do. We give him a stern talking to and get him housed with another student that volunteers to take him in. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. Some time passes and White keeps getting caught sleeping in class. He gets handed to the leading petty officer for the division because he's becoming "a special case." Finally, it all comes to a head when his old staff advisor is peeing and hears snores coming from a stall. He peeks through the door and sees White curled up on the toilet sleeping. He's pretty mad by this and walks outside the bathroom. It just so happens that a bunch of us (including a chief or two) were walking by. He vents to us about what he's found and says he's about to wake up White. The LPO, a huge bodybuilder type, gets the roid-rage and runs in. We hear a loud crash followed by screaming. White is pulled out and into the middle of a dozen staff members that had all congregated outside of the bathroom. I can only imagine that he was terrified. This would not be the best part of the night. Sometime later, a security alert is called away for the site. Nuke school has Very Serious security since we're an operational nuclear power plant with submarines. My chief gets called to come to the pier. On the pier, White is under armed guard from the security force. He was spotted by a guard tower swimming around one of the submarines. My chief asked him what the gently caress he was doing. White responds "I was standing on the pier looking at the submarine then I heard a splash and heard someone say 'oh poo poo.' I looked in the water and saw my [classified] book in the water and realized that I had said 'oh poo poo' so I jumped in the river. I don't know what happened after that" I can't remember if he had manage to get his book or if they had to send in divers after it. Yeah, sometimes we send in divers to get things dropped in the water by students. White was finally written up for all of his various problems after that. He gets sent to XOI and recommended for captain's mast. He shows up to his captain's mast in his dress uniform but my chief notices that parts of it are missing. He's yelling at White when he smells booze. "Are you drunk?" "A little..." They breathalyze him and he blows well over the limit. As an added bonus, he's 19 and drove in. My chief tells the captain what's happened. The CO leaned back in his chair and said "Welp, let's redo this in a few hours. I want every single possible charge added in." White is no longer in the Navy. Babby nukes are weird. Nukes are weird. Student nukes are worse since the completely mal-adjusted ones haven't self-selected out yet. I have had students that did not understand basic hygiene. On the ship I had someone that I wrote a page13 for so that an E-7 or above had to witness him shower at least every other day to include checking for use of soap and shampoo. I had a student that had his car stolen by another student that graduated and moved. The student was too introverted to bring up the fact that his car was stolen and just wrote it off. We found out about it from his roommate during a casual conversation. It took about one day to contact the CO of the graduated student and get the car brought back with the other guy in the brig. I had a student ask me where to buy watches once. He wasn't asking for suggestions. He was genuinely puzzled as to where one would make such a purchase. I asked him if he got out much. "Well, my roommates buy all the food and make it for me. I guess the only place I go other than my room is if my neighbor (another student) is playing Dungeons and Dragons" I'll post more later if there's interest.
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Dec 26, 2012 02:44
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:34 |
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We had a disgruntled security guy come in on his off day, check out an M16 from the armory without any paperwork, go to the flagpole, and shoot himself in the head right before colors. That was pretty scary since he easily could've unloaded it on everyone else first. Some members of the chain of command got replaced over that one. Boom My commanding officer got relieved after an electrician decided to not check to make sure a switchboard was deenergized and shoved a shorting probe into it. This had the effect of taking a high voltage current coming directly off of a generator and short circuit it through the probe to the floor. About an inch of metal was completely vaporized as the switchboard exploded. This caused a massive safety standdown. The culprit was saved by his PPE at least. It pretty well ended his career though. We ended up having to assign someone to go around the clock and empty one of the wet bilges out with a bucket while the switchboards were down for repair. That was a lot of fun. Boom2 If you don't completely reinstall every part of a generator, and leave bits of it dangling free, it might vaporize a few cubic inches of steel and require quite a lot of repair. Saying "I thought the other guy re-installed those brushes" does not make for a good excuse though "I was tired from being awake for 2 days" does help a little. Well, it makes people feel a little bad for you, at least. Puggles Petty Officer Puggles, as I called him, was a weird guy. I called him puggles because he was very curious, excitable, and dumb. I had a puggle when I met him and he reminded me of my dog which is probably the best compliment I can give him. Well, he did try -very hard- so I can give him some credit for that. Some interesting facts: Petty Officer Puggles was a member of a cult. He tithed a large percentage of his money to a preacher back home. His church had been expelled from the southern baptist convention for being too extreme. Think over that. Too conservative for southern baptists. I'm pretty open-minded about religion but he took it a bit too far. He believed that every version of the bible except for the King James 1600 version had been corrupted by a literal Satan to confuse true believers. Despite being fully aware of radioactivity, carbon dating, and nuclear physics, he believed in a 6000 year old earth. No part of the bible was not to be taken literally. I once had to give him a very, very stern talking to about gays. While on the duty van with two semi-closeted gays, he launched into a diatribe about how he feels bad for gays because they were destined to burn in eternal hellfire for their sinful ways. One of the hell-bound homosexuals in question came to relieve us very upset about this. Needless to say, it was a very uncomfortable conversation. "Yes, I know you think they're going to hell but you can't SAY that." "I'm just teaching the truth. It might save them from going to hell." "But you can't DO that." "It's what God wants" "You know that you could get discharged for inciting hate speech for this if one of them wanted to push the issue, right?" "But they're the sinners!" That was how arguing with him was. Oddly enough, he knocked up his girlfriend out of wedlock. Asked about this, he said that he was a dirty sinner and was trying to repent. They got married. She miscarried the next day. I kind of think she lied about being pregnant since Puggles was very naive about the world. Moving on, Puggles was capable of memorizing facts but not applying them. He could recite the procedural steps for doing various things but could not actually perform them. In a nuclear power plant, this is scary. It got to the point that a senior electrician (usually me) had to be there to monitor him whenever he was on watch. After several major mistakes, he was forbidden from actually doing anything. If anything electrical had to occur, an off watch electrician would be sent back aft to relieve him, perform the operation, then be relieved by him. We gave him hours of training but nothing would stick. Even simple tasks like "hang these rubber mats" would take him ages to perform (The record was 45 minutes to figure out how to hang up a 4 string rubber mat around a circuit box) My favorite Puggle moment was when we were working on a major high voltage system. He dropped a plastic cap into a hole filled with energized electrical gear while we were doing an energized-gear inspection. This isn't a huge deal. We backed out and sent a runner to get some tape and an insulated stick. It's not the ideal way to retrieve something but it's probably the safest. We relax and wait. I looked over to see Puggles grab a 2 foot long metal wrench out of the nearby toolchest and try to shove it into the hole. Cue four people screaming at him to get the gently caress away. Remember the exploding switchboard? This would've been the same thing. Despite being an E-5 nuclear trained electrician, he thought that shoving a 2 foot long metal wrench into what was effectively an energized high voltage switchboard to somehow fish out a plastic cap was a good idea. Despite all of this, he's still around. He's gotten a little better over time but drat, he's nearly broken everything at least once.
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Dec 26, 2012 03:21
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Mad Dragon posted:Wait. Was he staff or student? SPU. This is why everyone hates SPUs. Good test scores and looking good on paper yield poo poo like that.
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Dec 26, 2012 05:14
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My (worthless) chief forgot to fill out his clearance renewal paperwork so he lost his clearance. He spent 6 months completely unable to perform any facet of his job since going into the plant requires, gasp, a clearance. He spent every waking moment in the divisional office.. but if he was in there, we couldn't talk about anything work related or use any of the tech manuals. To make it better, he spent all of his time surfing the internet for cycling videos. After a few months, people finally just started telling him that they had to do work that he wasn't cleared for and to  He bitched up a storm anytime someone did it but knew that we were right.
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Dec 26, 2012 16:29
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I had a student at nuke school who had never worn shoes prior to the Navy. He was horrible at everything except for tests. He was so bad that there was another student assigned to supervise him during cleaning time to make sure he didnt burn himself or otherwise injure himself in the plant. He graduated and went to my old ship. The Reactor Officer (O-6) was watching propulsion transients in the control room with this genius as throttleman. They order an all-ahead flank cavitate (go as fast as you can, as fast as you can) and everyone does the right thing. Three of the for shafts start turning much faster as their throttlemen answer the bell. My darling child's shaft is still spinning the same though. What happened? He gets a warning light on his control panel and stares at it. It didn't mean anything important but he had no clue what to do about it. The RO, rather angry, shouts "What's that light on your panel?" "Uh, I dunno" "What are you going to do about it?" "I dunno" "Are you going to answer the ordered bell?" "Uhhhhhh" "WATCH OFFICER! GET THIS MAN RELIEVED!" Someone else came down, ship's course was corrected, everything worked out fine. Except for my darling student. The Reactor Officer grabbed his training folder took him to his stateroom and started asking him questions about standing throttleman. After that, he went through his other watchstations asking him questions about that. He finally went through and asked him questions pertaining to the plant in general. The result? He shredded my star pupil's training record and made him start over requalifying everything from scratch. I heard he went sadpanda after that.
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Dec 29, 2012 15:43
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Kavak posted:There were men like that in my grandpa's army unit, though that was 1944. Where was he from? Also, what does going "sadpanda" mean? I can't remember his name, much less where he was from. In the nuclear community, going "sadpanda" means informing someone that you have suicidal thoughts. This immediately gets you removed from a duty status and usually permanently disqualifies you from nuclear duty. It is the fastest way to go "I quit!" and is commonly used by junior enlisted to inact an instantaneous transfer to another department that doesn't work 90 hour weeks.
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Dec 29, 2012 16:16
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That's the enlisted life.
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Jan 15, 2013 12:44
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I'm sitting in class wearing a fleece cap RIGHT NOW because I sit under the AC vent. I promise the only military thing on my car is my old parking sticker!
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Feb 1, 2013 14:03
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Veins McGee posted:I have never heard anyone but the biggest boots on the planet greet an officer by saying "oohrah sir!" I would regularly do that to my shift officer multiple times per day. Neither one of us were Marines.
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Feb 5, 2013 20:21
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I used to constantly do it to people I worked with. I'd throw in the most ridiculous nuke/navy poo poo ever to make it even more diggity. "Shipmate, you need to shim in." "Shipmate, what would Admiral Rickover think?" "Shipmate, you need to shut your throttles" "Shipmate, you're going to let chief down if he finds out. We can't let chief down, remember!!" "Bravo zulu, shipmate! Remember to put this on your brag sheet!!" I would do it to students sometimes but they'd never get that I was loving with them. I've had students add me on facebook after graduating that were completely floored that I did not, in fact, love the navy and say a prayer to Nimitz every night before turning to in my rack hooyah.
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Feb 6, 2013 04:26
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grumplestiltzkin posted:gently caress. You. What's wrong proto-pal?
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Feb 6, 2013 13:56
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It's where you jack someone off until their genitals are a bloody mess. I thought everyone knew that term.
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Mar 22, 2013 11:43
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Martello posted:Those are a different breed. We had guys see them too but nobody banged any as far as I know. Sunny Beach literally has a red-light district in the surrounding forest. Hookers standing next to their assigned trees, with little crates of condoms and other equipment.  Is this a fake post?
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Mar 27, 2013 18:10
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I was in the pretend floating military. Does that mean he authorized a high explosive bombardment instead of an illumination flare?
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Mar 29, 2013 12:56
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what about RECRUIT D...gently caress, whatever navy boot camp people are
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Mar 31, 2013 18:06
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We had a guy standing watch in the reactor control room that poo poo his pants on watch. When he finally got a watch relief, he trailed poo poo all through the control room and up the ladderwell. They made a nub clean it up. He was equally famous for going up to a guy doing sketches in berthing and offering him 50$ to draw a nude 6 breasted cat lady. Oh, he also spoke elvish.
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May 5, 2013 03:03
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In a thread about military idiocy, people are arguing about wearing cammies off base. I think that we've stared so long into the void....
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May 10, 2013 15:19
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:34 |
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One of my friends put on the arc flash suit and chased someone out of the plant and across the mess decks late at night when only a few people were awake.
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Jun 2, 2013 20:18
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