Now here's what happened to somebody who complained too stridently against his duly peer assigned callsign. This ain't pretty either.

and it names names.

In the same month as the maiden flight of the Columbia we get assigned one Petty Officer (E-4) Shettles. Now sadly for him they dropped him on us at an at-sea period. Tensions and stresses are always higher at sea due to the work load and the long hours. It can be very intimidating to newbies and some withdraw for a bit until they get their feet under them. In Shettles case he would zone a bit and stare into the distance unless directly addressed or assigned a task.

We labeled him "Space" Shettles.

This was a perfectly valid callsign assignment and he not only complained about it, he went "through channels" starting with our chief, Chief Baker. A Chief is an E-7 for you Army and Airforce types.

Chief Baker very much advised him to not persue the complaint and tried to discribe how it would probably go down, but Petty Officer Shettles wouldn't listen to good advice. And Chief Baker had to move the complaint up to the division officer. After that we were officially not permited to call him "Space" Shettles anymore.

You're just waiting for what happens next, aren't you?

Enter the Moose

One of the big personalities in my shop was AQ1 Gary "Moose" Owens. Petty Officer Owens was an E-6 and a brilliant technician and flightdeck trouble shooter. He also was the very clone of Jack Nickelson, only 6 foot 7. From the same part of the world, so he talked like him too.

He very much suffered fools poorly and didn't mind expressing displeasure at stupid mistakes physically. Fer instance:

One time several of my shop mates and myself were coming down off the flightdeck (The "roof") all covered with equipment and having those racoon eyes made from wearing goggles in a sooty enviroment when, as we enter the first of two spaces that comprised our shop space, we heard another Funny Noise coming from the inner room. This Funny Noise was different than the last Funny Noise mentioned above.

This Funny Noise sounded like you would imagine a weiner dog in a cement mixer to sound like. As we had neither weiner dogs nor cement mixers in our shop our collective curiosities were peaked. (Gillian, is that the right one?)

As we came in the door, immediately to my right I see Petty Officer Owens (E-6) with the foot of Petty Officer "Jones" (E-4) who was going to AIMD, intermediate maintanence, because he was knowledgable, but not cut out for flightdeck duty or working on airplanes directly.

Owens was spinning Jones' foot in a rapid clockwise fashion while Jones' body was stuck in the foot well of one of those Navy sheet metal desks. In order to prevent the dislocation of his hip Jones was forced to spin at the end of his own leg like a wad of cotton candie on the end of those paper cones.

And what, you may ask, had Petty Officer Jones done to diserve such rude and unseemly treatment?

In the process of replacing a bad 155 pin connector Petty Officer Jones cut off the cannon plug of a vital weapons control system wiring harness before he marked the identity of all the wiring. Yup. Just snipped it off like you would a rosehip. Now all 155 wires had to be ohmed out and the tech pubs scoured to find every single reading each wire should give you. All 155 of them.

Command had plans for that airplane that didn't include it being hard down for days on end because of a stupid error from one of *your* guys. They get really upset and want it fixed NOW! Your shop works on it 24/7 until its fixed and it can still take days.

So Owens, I distinctly recall, put his hands behind his head and stretched out his legs and smiled that big ol' smile that said someones getting hurt, and said, "Well, since he couldn't lift the toolbox all the way up to the wing last night, and it was (the light 25 pound one not the normal 35 pounder) we just have to call him "Sister".

The division officer's take on it was he already dealt with this issue once, he didn't have time for it anymore. (He warned him too)

He was Sister Shettles from then on. "Sis" for short. His time in service was a little more bitter than mine.

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah