The Great Cereal Caper

One time, I almost went to captain’s mast over cereal.

That in and of itself was not so unusual; I’m sure it will surprise no one that I went to mast lots of times during my hitch in the Fun Time Navy. Sometimes it was righteous, like the time I told a master chief he was all screwed up (apparently, you’re not allowed to do this, even if it’s true). Sometimes it was BS, like the time I got busted for “talking about non propulsion plant related material in maneuvering”. But nothing tops getting written up over cereal.

Believe it or not, cereal is actually very important on a boat. We usually didn’t have time to sit around in crew’s mess and wait on a cook to screw up eggs and bacon, so those little “fun-sized” boxes were all we had. When I first got to the boat, though, the only cereal we could get were some knock-off versions of raisin bran and cheerios.

Or, so we were led to believe.

A funny thing happens if you complain about the food enough – your chief makes you the division’s representative on something called the “menu review board”. That’s when the Chop and the MS chief pack twenty or so people in crew’s mess and lecture them for a half hour about how hard it is to balance nutrition and a limited food budget when you’ve got to cook a meal for one hundred guys in a kitchen about the same as you’d find in a small apartment.

But it did give me access to the catalog that lists what food they could order. Believe it or not, there was LOTS of good, brand-name crap in there. But when we asked the chop why he didn’t order us stuff like doritos and snickers bars, his response was “You guys would just eat it”. And this was the guy in charge of feeding us.

Anyhow, one day I got stuck working on a grounded circuit in the pantry. We’d had this intermittent ground for about two years on forward lighting, and it had become sort of a hobby for off watch electricians to try and find it (And, we did, too – it turned out there was a light switch, in the ceiling no less, right above where the cooks used to stick big pans of stuff to cool off. Every time they slammed a pan into the rack, it would smash into the switch. I’m positive some yardbird installed that switch there specifically to screw with electricians, but I digress). In the course of tracing a cable run, I had to unload the pantry cabinets and, since the pantry was already full, I ended up stacking the stuff up in crew’s mess.

About twenty minutes later one of the cooks comes in, all pissed off. It seems that one of the boxes I put out there was full of cereal. Not just any cereal, but all sorts of good stuff, like cocoa pebbles, frosted flakes, and (holiest of holies) captain crunch. It didn’t take long for someone to notice this forbidden fruit, and now crew’s mess was packed with sailors shoveling down cereal as fast as they could.

The problem was that all the “good” cereal was supposedly reserved for the officers. Whenever a box of assorted cereal came in, one of the cooks would go through it and sort out all the name brand stuff, leaving us blueshirt scum with the knock-offs. The MS’s, not to mention the denizens of the wardroom, were pissed I’d got into their secret stash; the MS chief stopped by personally to tell he wrote me up for stealing or misuse of government property or something else equally pointless.

Now, I didn’t mind that the crew thought I was playing Robin Hood, even though I had no idea what was in the in the boxes when I set them out there. But I didn’t feel like going to mast because some hungry guys got to eat something other that gruel for a change. When the chief got done, I just quietly reminded him of all the stuff I overlooked whenever I had to work on the galley gear; stuff that I could have just as easily shown to Doc, which would have resulted in a cleaning frenzy the likes of which the cooks only saw around the NEY competition. Plus, there’s just too many ways an electrician can ruin your day, be it gear mysteriously tagged out when you need it most, or a rack light that just won’t stay on for more than thirty seconds at a time. Somehow the report chit never made it to the XO.

But at least we had something more that "oaty-o's" to eat for breakfast after that. Now that we knew what the cooks were up to, they had to put some of the good stuff out on the mess decks to keep us from raiding the pantry. I count that as a victory, sort of.