Lunch, anyone?

XRDC submitted 464 days ago

One of my areas of responsibility while in the Navy was the regular maintenance of the sewage collection, holding, and transfer (CHT) system. Due to obvious risks of contamination, food was explicitly off limits in the CHT room.

I had a new engineman tagging along with me one day on watch. As luck would have it, his stomach did not react kindly to the ships movements felt below decks and we had to stop periodically on our rounds for him to “toss the cookies�?. While a shipmate thought it would be useful to give him a plastic bag as a portable container, I couldn't stand seeing through to its contents and so advised him to keep the plastic bag inside of a paper bag.

Well our rounds took us down to the CHT room where as fate would have it, my supervisor and his supervising officer were both walking through as well. Apparently, as a show of authority, they decided to challenge our adherence to protocol and asked what was in the bag. Knowing what it looked like I couldn't resist telling them what they wanted so desperately to hear: Lunch. Then the supervising officer ordered the engineman to open the bag and let him see its contents. All I could say at that point was that he didn’t ask in which state ‘lunch’ was in.