Sibling Rivalry

One of the reasons I think the two crews on a Trident get along so well is that it's just too easy to bag your buddies when you know they'll be taking the boat out while you're safe at home. But sometimes they forgot how readily we could screw them, and hilarity ensued.

This all started during refit assist. For various reasons, the blue crew wanted us to help them man their watchbill, in addition to the usual BS stuff like doing all their maintenance and painting all their bilges. Normally I got out of things like this because I ran the powder coat team, but not this time. We were offcrew, but many of us were also three-section duty.

(And you fast attack guys can stifle it - off crew is just another reward for being on a boomer. You’d want it, too, if you were in our place. Trident Tough!)

To add insult to injury, the Blue crew had a policy that chiefs weren’t supposed to stand EDPO if there were enough firsts around to cover it. One of the ways they made the firsts available is by pulling them off the main watchbill, which was the main reason they needed us to help out.

Well, one of the guys on my crew took a week off during refit assist to fly home for a wedding in the family. This had been approved weeks before we even pulled in, and our CO backed him up despite the whining of the Blue crew. One of their chiefs had to cover for his EDPO slot twice that week.

In some sort of half-assed retaliation, they made the paint team come in over the weekend, under the pretence that it was the only time some areas could get painted without unnecessarily disrupting normal work. This evil plan was the brainchild of their M-div leading first and, in revenge, we froze his rack on his next duty day.

For those of you who don’t know what that means, we took his mattress, wet it down, and stuck it in a freezer until it was “crunchy”. The key is not to get it too wet, otherwise it’s too heavy and can’t be easily maneuvered inside the boat. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. When the victim climbs in his rack, everything seems normal for a few minutes, until that cold, wet feeling penetrates the sheets. Needless to say, you have to find someone else’s rack for the night. Drying it out again poses all sorts of problems as well. (Curiously, this is easier to do at sea, where there are many nice warm spots in the ER. In port, you’re screwed).

Well, the gloves came off, and both crews starting doing all sorts of little petty crap to each other. I won’t go into details, but I will say my crew got the final laugh with The Milk Incident.

The Milk Incident was pure genius; the inspired concept of one of the JOs (they usually watched out sibling rivalry with bemusement, but this time they got sucked in as well). Right before they left, we put a tall glass of milk in one of the vent ducts that fed into maneuvering, way back were it wouldn’t be noticed. The first time they did some angles and dangles, the glass tipped over and coated the bottom of the duct with milk. Because of the flanges in the duct, however, none ran out and they were not immediately aware what we’d done.
That came a few weeks later when the whole area started to reek of spoiled milk. They searched for days (literally) before realizing the source of the smell. The only way to fix it was to take the duct apart, a real pain in the butt at sea due to all the crap around it. The boat still had the faint whiff of sour milk when they pulled back in.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. They had an entire patrol to decide how to pay us back. But that’s a tale for another day. :)