Steve...POW!!

Don't let anyone tell you there's nothing to do in Indiana.
Imagine an ordinary baseball...Now imagine that same baseball with over 19,100 coats of paint on it. Getting the picture? Good, because that's exactly what this guy and his wife, Glenda, have done for the past 28 1/2 years. Now that ordinary baseball that once weighed less than one pound now weighs in around 1,700 pounds!

I hope I can tell this sea story without running too long. I was helping Bro paint his house yesterday when I remembered this. He was kinda trapped and had to listen to me tell it. You think my written stories are long and rambling, you should hear me tell them...

My ship was in a maintenance availability period. We were hung all over with scaffolding, tarps and plastic. We had a lot of grinding and chipping going on.

I owned a LOT of the topside structure, as it took a lot of structure to hold my four massive radar arrays. By own it, I of course am using the navy terminology that translates as "is responsible for painting". And I knew my responsibility for getting it painted, and had submitted, and gotten back approved, my plan of action & milestones. As usual, my act was together. We had planned our work and were working our plan.

Then the Division Officer walks up one morning and tells me we need to paint the deckhouse today. "No, sir", I reply, "that's scheduled for next Monday. That's when we get the cherry picker and spray gun." Long story short, the Commodore might visit the ship across the pier tomorrow, so he might look at our ship as he walks, and, despite the fact that we are obviously in an availability (which he knows already since he's paying for it), if he does glance at us we WILL be freshly painted.

So, ever the good squid, I suck it up and go tell the troops. It was, after all, an argument I was not going to win: Painting something -vs- overhauling something.

The troops did not take kindly to dropping "real" work to paint, nor to doing it by using rollers while hanging from a rope chair over the side when there were sprayers and a cherry picker on the way. They hated the idea of doing something half-assed when it didn't have to be. But I politely used my "because I said you would" argument and we commenced work.

The ship across the pier was considered to be "special", and not in the good way. Our officers were always tweaking them, asking them things like "Do you guys need the stock number for haze gray paint? No? Sorry, it looked like you might have lost it." Because we were such buttholes to them, I am sure they took great delight in pointing the following out to us.

The next morning I was awakened by a frantic Command Duty Officer, complete with sputtering and flailing. It was about 4:50 AM and he was freaking. All I could make out was something about "Forget this (which is more or less what he said, although not verbatim)" ... "port deckhouse" ... "Commodore coming". None of which was really making sense to me.

I dressed and followed him and what I found was this. In four foot high letters, formed by NOT painting an area, was the stated opinion FORGET THIS! In the afternoon sunlight the old gray and the fresh gray looked more or less the same and the deckhouse looked nice. But in the morning light, where the sunlight was striking at an angle, there was a noticeable difference in the new and old paint, allowing a simple message, in four foot high letters, to be observed.

I calmly told the officer I'd take care of it and went and woke up a few of my guys to start rigging up the rope chair for a little early morning touch up painting. And we did take care of it. And order was more or less restored to the universe.

While I was standing there supervising the repainting, one foot up on a bitt and a cup of joe in my gnarly, seagoing hand, the CT chief came up to talk to me. This guy had the best name. Steve Pow. I loved it. Hey, look, it's Steve POW! But I digress.

So Stevie says to me, "So, your boys think the side of the ship is their own personal bulletin board, do they?"

"Well, Steve, party line: I'm appalled. Just appalled. But really, I'm pretty proud of the little boneheads."

"Yeah, my CTs would be too scared to do something like that."

After the repainting, I went to find the guy I knew had done it. I knew he had because he was my best man. Very focused and very driven to perfection. I knew that dropping a job that he was in the middle of, a very important job, to paint something badly instead of waiting and doing it properly, pissed him off to no end.

"Hoffy, I know you and Pauly did that."

"You're wrong, Chief. Pauly had nothing to do with it."

"OK. Hoffy, it was funny. Good job. You know it can never happen again, right?"

"Yep."

Swabbing and swapping sea stories, out

Ramblin' Ed