When I was on the Ike, I was the conning officer during a situation where an A-7 had to make an emergency landing. Very tense few minutes until the pilot and his aircraft were safely onboard (pilot was awarded the Air Medal 10 minutes later). In the middle of all this, the junior watch officer pipes up from other side of the bridge “Hey, look! Dolphins!”
The Captain was less than amused and designated him the “Porpoise Watch Officer” (PWO) and modified the standing orders to read that whenever marine mammals were sighted (day or night), the PWO was to be posted at the bow of the flight-deck and point at them until they were no longer visible (unless we were conducting flight ops, of course).
This was highly entertaining for a few days, but it grew old fast. The skipper relented after a couple of weeks. The downside was that the PWO was my roommate – those nighttime sightings were not fun for anyone.
I went to a private college, they had more rules than most (wear ties etc)so we would try to “help” the freshman class out.
We told them due to a horrible incident last year that we aren’t going to get into, all freshman must report to the dean’s office at 5am for Tie Check.
We prefer you bring them in your own cardboard box, and arrange them by color, unless you’re one of those graphic tie people, then please arrange by theme and drape them over the outside of the box for easy checking.
Sometimes the Dean gets there late, but he’s the Dean, you are not! Don’t be late!
The Dean would show up at 8:30am with a huge line of drowsy boys holding weird boxes with ties hanging out. Sometimes he would just smile, walk into his office, then shut the door and ignore them.
I worked a Sears for a short stint in high school. Some of the guys there tried to get me with the Flux Capacitor gag. I just said that was in electronics and transferred them.
One of my jobs, we would have the newbies go get a metric adjustable wrench. Then we would tell them they brought us the standard one, we wanted metric. Usually didn’t take too long for them to figure it out.
I worked with a guy who was a mechanic in the Marine Air Corps. His story was they’d tell the new guy to either order 500 yards of flight line or a barrel of prop wash. One day they sent the noob to order a barrel of prop wash. A couple of weeks later a truck showed up with a bunch of 55 gallon barrels on it. Unbeknownst to the veteran mechanics the Marine Corps had a solution for cleaning propellers.
@whitetigertooth my Grandpa was in the Signal Corps during WWII and stationed in England. He was a RADAR and communications technician. He used to tell us that in the middle of the bitter winter, they would go out and stand in front of the RADAR dish for like 10 seconds to warm up. So yeah my Grandpa and his Army buddies microwaved themselves…
My late brother-in-law had to be a witness at a court-martial, when a guy died a day after walking through the beam of a nose cone radar that got accidentally switched on while the aircraft was being worked on.
The guy was walking round the peritrack.
IT people have used the ID10T code to specify the source of a computer problem for a long time now (though I’d bet the acronym is way older than that). There’s also the PEBKAC error – Problem Exist Between Keyboard and Chair. As I said in another thread, IT people have acronyms for everything!
Okay…when I worked at a marina rigging new boats for delivery to customers, I had a very young and not to bright guy working with me. I needed to get rid of him for a while so I asked him to go get a metric adjustable end wrench (basically a metric Crescent wrench). I emphasized, “A metric one!” He didn’t come back for a full half hour and I completed my work in peace. He came back with a Crescent wrench. - Rich
I agree on the IT bit — IT people don’t speak English, they speak acronyms! First day of my internship (in 2015 working on a degree in Network Communications Management) and I was asked to sit in on a vendor meeting. As I sat there quietly and listed to the vendor and the engineers “talking tech” (AKA acronyms) my brain was wishing for a bit stronger formulation of caffeine as the talk was going rapidly ---- I literally was “watching” the acronym appear above their head, deciphering it, shrinking it and quickly moving to the next guy that was talking (I was one of 2 women in the room) and repeating for each person. By the end of the 2 hour meeting, I was exhausted ---- but so bleeping proud of myself for keeping up!!
I have been working in the Electric Company in NERC CIP and today’s meeting was acronyms and compliance guidelines — and it was basically a repeat just in a slightly different “accent”.
When I was getting close to graduating, my mother called me up wanting to know what my degree was in … I told her “acronyms” … and I got back a “no, really…what is it?” ---- then I tried to explain networking and what fascinated me about it – she said ok no that’s too much to tell the card club — so I said “again, mom, just tell them I majored in acronyms!”
I’m at a tech conference and I literally wrote this in my notes for today: SOAP API EOL 6/2020
Translated: SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) API (Application Programming Interface) EOL (End of Life) 6/2020 (June 2020). Basically it means I’ve got some work to do before June of 2020.
