The Shaved Hampster

Believe it or not, there was a time when the coners had ratings other than MM, ET, and COOK. Back then, there was this weird little rate known as "IC man", who's insignia was a phone handset over a globe. This was to remind them to call an electrician when their shit broke, which was rather often.

When I got to my first boat, "IC div" was led by a first class they affectionately nicknamed The Shaved Hampster ("SH" for short). To give you an idea how things operated back then, all work in IC div came to a stop for a solid week when the SH forgot to leave the key to their tech manual locker behind before he took off on leave. None of them were especially adept at fixing stuff, mainly because the SH wouldn't let anyone touch their gear but him.

So, one fine fine Navy day I was heading forward through crew's mess when I spied three of them opening a P-panel with a diggit tool. For those of you lucky enough to not know, a P-panel is just a big metal box full of fuses we use to distribute power to non-essential crap, like crew's mess. P-panels were also an enigma: while we couldn't work on any other equipment energized (without a major flop-n-twitch, anyhow) the command never said a word when we'd open P-panels to pull the fuses out, even though half of the thing was copper bus bars full of juice. At least the tool we used was made out of non-conductive melamine.

The diggit tool the IC men had, however, was not made out of melamine. My spider senses tingling, I reminded them not to use it to pull fuses. "Fuck off, nub" one replied, which I promptly did. I was a nub on a soda run, with sigs at stake. But, when I came back though crew's mess a few minutes later, there was the entire IC div gathered around the SH. They had rigged a complete rubber room around the P-panel, and SH was decked out in rubber from head to toe. As he approached the open panel with trembling hands, I asked him what he was doing.

"Dipshit (not his real name) got shocked trying to pull some fuses - there may be a short." he said.

"He got shocked because he was pulling them with a set of steel pliers," I replied "let me do that."

A few seconds later all three fuses were pulled and I continued aft with the sodas I'd been sent to get. These days I'd never dream of intentionally looking the other way when someone was about to do something stupid, but you have to admit it's an effective training tool. After that, they'd just call us when they needed fuses pulled.