Bob’s Coffee Cup

The first thing you need to know is that Bob was one of those rare chiefs that gives you hope that the Navy knew what it was doing when it set up the present rank structure. He showed up at the end of WestPac as a replacement for our previous chief, universally known as The Weasel. Weasel wasn't a bad person, he just wasn't all that effective a chief. We were essentially leaderless for about three years, which is why fate rewarded us with Bob.

Bob always lead from the front - he could out-drink, out-fight, and out-work anyone else in the engine room. In fact, one time he more or less started the plant up by himself when we had to get out of Dodge in a hurry. He had a decent sense of humor, and went to bat for us so often that E-Div was the envy of the boat. If you scroll down a few entries, you'll read my advice on running a nuc division. Those rules were how things were run under Bob.

When the Eng asked me what I thought of our new chief, I responded immediately that I would stay in the Navy as long as Bob did, provided my detailer would ensure I always worked for him. Not to belabor the point, but Bob was awesome.

However, that didn't make him immune to a little good-natured prank.

Bob's one hang-up, if you could even call it that, was stow-for-sea. Everything in the engineering spaces, at all times, 24-7. Usually Bob was pretty good about just asking us to keep it picked up, and usually we made sure he didn't even have to ask, but one time things got a little out of hand when one of the ETs left a ashtray loose in the horseshoe.

Oddly enough, those old metal ashtrays were like gold on our boat, for two main reasons: First, we never seemed to have enough, back in the day when you could smoke anywhere. Second, and more critically, the Eng hated smokers in the engine room, and tried to curb the smoking by proclaiming that you had to use one of the metal ashtrays, no exception. Since there were exactly two back aft when we left Pearl on WestPac, they were guarded closely and turned over from watch to watch.

One day, however, the ETs were milling about aft of maneuvering, supposedly to fix some of their stuff, but really to avoid the General Misuse of Time our QMC was giving in crews' mess. Most of them were smoking, and the ashtray got pretty full. After they got done, but before I could empty it (I was the AEA, and smoking about a pack a day back then) Bob came along and accidentally kicked it. The lid came flying off, and the crap went everywhere.

Now, I was more than happy to clean it up, but Bob just wouldn't let it go. He had the ashtray TDU'd and stormed around for the rest of the watch about stowing for sea. No one had *ever* seen him upset about *anything*, and here he was all spun up over a loose ashtray. As nucs are prone to do, we became curious how much further we could push him.

The very next watch, he made the mistake of leaving his coffee cup unattended and unstowed on top of our locker in middle level. He had a really nice personalized boat mug from his previous command that he carried everywhere, kind of like Popeye carried around spinach. One time it got chipped during a drill, and he paid some ungodly amount in Guam to have to fixed. This was a man who loved his mug.

So, naturally, we taped it up.

But this was no mere tape job - we used every trick we knew in the art of mummifying something with EB Green, including backwards wrapping, heat shrinking, and even rubber insulating tape. The end result was a basketball-sized lump that brought an impressed whistle from everyone who saw it, including the Eng.

Bob took it in stride, and just started trying to untape it. After about an hour (he was loathe to use a knife, for fear of scratching it, but there really was no other way) he managed to get enough tape off it to realize that it wasn't his cup. It was actually one of the cups from the galley, and inside was a note with instructions on how to find *his* cup. Bob sort of shrugged, and sent me off with the directions. His face visibly sagged when I returned with another taped-up cup.

Bob didn't screw around with this one - he immediately started hacking on it with his knife. Sure enough, after twenty minutes he was rewarded with another galley mug and another note. He was not amused.

By the fifth cup we were starting to get worried. As I said, Bob was usually pretty easygoing, so we were totally unprepared for a truly angry Chief Bob. He didn't raise his voice, but there was this look in his eye that said someone, some day, was going out a torpedo tube ass-first for this. It's not often that we would admit we may have "gone too far" when we were messing with someone, but this was one of those times.

When he finally got the sixth one untaped, the note sent him to our locker in middle level, where his mug had been carefully stowed for sea the whole time. Even we didn't have the balls to actually tape up his coffee cup; an impromptu scavenger hunt was the closest we'd come. Also, there was some doubt whether tape would actually stick to it; this was not an especially clean cup, and cleaning would have been too great a sacrilege, even for us.

The very next day, a brand new ashtray mysteriously appeared in the horseshoe.