I know the Regs in the RN are a bit lacking in the braincell department but the MOD PLOD’S aren’t much better…
#1 Was working in Faslavatory as a Civvy Comcen Techie. Job entailed going round the West of Scotland doing various maintenance jobs in other establishments. This obviously meant taking stuff in and out of CSB for use elsewhere. Now as is required we had to get a signed chitty saying what we were carrying and where it was going. All was well and good until I got my joining instructions for HMS Raleigh. When this came I got my hair shaved (No 1) and slapped in to discontinue shaving. Yours truly looked quite the Sailor, and that’s when the trouble started…
Was walking out of the gate one day with tool case, test equipment and said chitty in hand, was stopped by PLOD and asked to reveal contents of tool case. Now this tool case had about 50 single items within it. PLOD decided that all these should be put on chitty. I (being only 2 months in the MoD) advised PLOD of sheer lunacy of this practice (in a polite way of course) to wit Plod decided that he wanted to speak to my boss and asked for his name…
“Mr Malc…ext **** ” Says I
Plod gets on blower and asks to speak to “WO” Malc… a conversation ensues that put’s plod right in the picture. After coming of the phone, he was in fairness rather apologetic. He said that I looked like Jack and they always made a point of stopping sailors at the gate as they didn’t complain as much about it. At this point I reminded said Plod that (at the time) Civvy’s made up 60% of Faslane’s manning and in all probability would be the more likely culprits for pilfering. He agreed with me and just to equalize the scores ensured that I got checked both going In AND out of the base for the next two weeks.
#2 Again Faslane…
We were getting a lot of calls about Computer Terminals going U/S in the Neptune Admin. It seemed to be sparodic and always seemed to be the keyboards. After a couple of weeks of this I was sent over to find out if there were any issues that may be causing this. When I got there I found one of the UPO keyboards had given up. Had a short conversation with the user and she said that it hadn’t worked properly since RPO To*** had sent a lad down to clean the terminal.
“Oh?” says I, “Do you know what lad cleaned the keyboard with?”
“Yes actually – WD40”
It transpired that said Reg was giving out punishment for minor Mulct’s and thinking the IT equipment could do with a right good clean, and noticing the wonders performed by WD40 on his Motorbike Engine - decided to dispatch said defaulters armed with Pusser’s own variant of the Solvent and cloth. Needless to say even after I got the practice stopped we were still changing out Workstations months afterwards as the WD40 set to work corroding all the components slowly but surely on the recently cleaned equipment!
#3 HMS Raleigh Basic Training – RNR
Got caught without “licence to Breathe” LREG Thought it would be of benefit me by sticking me in a cell for 3 hours (I think it had something to do with me being a Tiff) – It was great! Got a couple of hours Kip and when I got out (early evening) Found that everyone else had squared my gear away for evening rounds.