One day in the service, i was volunteered to assist with a supply ship restocking of the supplies on our tender. The ship i was on provided services and supplies to submarines that tied up alongside, and we were restocked about once a quarter.
Supplies were lifted over by crane, stacked on top of two pallets. We broke them down and lowered them into the ship on conveyors.
I was put in charge of the stacks of empty pallets.
Now, there's two designs for pallets. Both designs can be lifted by a forklift, or a hand-truck. The crane can only lift one of the designs. So i was cautioned to make sure that when we stacked the empties, the one for the crane had to be on the bottom. That way we could sent the stack back to the supply ship when our forecastle was full of supplies.
We were stacking them a good seven feet high, shoving them into corners to be out of the way. When we had about thirty stacks, one of my guys noticed that one stack had the wrong kind of pallet on the bottom. The crane couldn't lift it.
EVERYONE told me we had to break the stack down and restack it correctly. I came up wiht a much easier plan. Everyone stared at me with their mouths open.
We got a break in bringing the supplies aboard, so i briefed the guys attaching the crane's lifts, and their safety observer. They stared, except for the safety observer. "Always give jobs to the smart, lazy guy," he said. "He'll find the easiest way to do anything."
I'd have taken offense at his characterization, but it seemed too much like work...
The supply guy supervising the load, a petty officer Nixon, saw the stack in question. He told me to restack it. i explained a much easier way to work it. He walked away, shaking his head.
We started sending the stacks back to the supply ship. Someone would hand truck the stack into place, they'd attach the lifts, off it went. In the middle of this, two supply chiefs saw The Stack Of Doom. They both start telling me that i have to restack it. I said i didn't have to. They both start yelling at me.
Now, one of them was from the Phillipines, with a thick accent.
One of them was from Macon, Georgia, with a thicker accent. For a while, there, they were both agreeing with each other at the top of their lungs. I finally told them that PO Nixon said it was okay. They run off to yell at him.
We move a few more stacks back.
Nixon could not remember exactly how i was going to deal with the stack. "But he had a plan..." "That's bullshit! We have to restack it!" The three of them charge back around the corner to force me to do it their way.
The Stack of Doom came up just then. I did nothing more than catch everyone's eye, indicating 'this is the one we talked about.'
The chiefs both stood with their arms crossed, smug in the knowledge that i was about to screw everything up. Then they's swoop down and Fix Everything.
Then the guys attached the crane lifts to the second pallet up. That was the right kind.
The crane lifted the stack away easily.
Two of the handlers grabbed the bottom pallet, now the ONLY pallet, and threw it up on top of the next stack as someone else slid it into position. By the time the crane came back, they just went along as normal....
Chiefs were stunned. Then they oozed into trying to take credit for it. "That's just what we were gonna have you do," they said.
Yeah.
Sure.
There ARE things the Navy does because we've tried a lot of ways and this one works best. And there are things that we do because, i suspect, we started doing it 'that way' about the time the first guy in Ur watched logs float down the river and thought, "You know, i bet a guy could stand on that..."
But the worst part of any institution's policy is not 'we've always done it that way.'
it's when 'we've always done it that way' means 'that's the only way TO do it.'
