How to Get Orderly Officer Duties Really, Really Wrong
The following saga tells the story of what happens when an Orderly Officer really makes a c*ck of it. Thankfully it was not me, but was from army unit down the road in Berlin. Said unit had no comcen, so was served by Gatow. If a signal arrived out of normal hours, duty comcen operator would phone army OO, who would send army duty driver to collect. Only a 10 minute trip between the two sites. Among Gatow comcen operators was one chap blessed (or cursed?) with a totally unintelligible Glasgow accent that required subtitles even face-to-face. Gatow OOs were used to him and whatever he said on the phone, OO always went to comcen to retrieve signal to read in detail. One night, Glaswegian comcen operator phones army OO to tell him there is a casualty signal. Army OO's unit was currently deployed down in West Germany on exercise, leaving only a rear party in barracks. One sgt had had a heart attack and is VSI. Army OO sends driver to collect signal, but then demands that comcen operator reads him the text over the phone. Instead of waiting for hard copy, OO rushes round to MQs to tell wife of Sgt A that he is VSI and she needs to prepare to be driven from Berlin to his side in hospital. To help in sorting out upset wife, calls on neighbour to help - wife of Sgt B, also deployed on same exercise. Meanwhile, driver arrives with hard-copy signal, plus another one which has just come saying that Sgt B has moved from being VSI to deceased.
As you can imagine, the dwang that OO had dropped himself in was bottomless and getting deeper. Most of bn officers were deployed, so finding appropriate level of saviour from those remaining was very difficult. To cut a long story short, OO volunteered to make a very substantial personal financial contribution to the CO's Welfare Fund, and, as far as I remember, was OO for the majority of the rest of his tour (or career, which I should think became the same thing.)