There are lots of famous phrases in the military. Phrases that immediately strike certain images in people's minds or cause flashbacks to those that have served. Phrases like, 'Fire in the hole!', 'No one left behind!" 'Forward march!' or, 'You're my eyes Goose!' and, 'Do you think that Thai chick was really a man?' The whole Armed Forces is run on acronyms, phrases, and jargon that half it's own military doesn't even understand. Yet we all still like to say fancy military things all the time just to sound important and impress the ladies. The Army and Marines love doing it. It is always entertaining to watch them explain to a pretty female civilian what they do for a living and how they train and all the equipment they use. They start throwing out big random words and numbers and '9ers' like they are S.E.A.L Team 6 1/2 or something. When in reality, all they really do is practice shooting paper once a week.
There is one famous military phrase though that immediately brings fear to everyone that hears it. A phrase that is never followed by anything positive. A phrase that evokes the thought, 'What the fuck did I do now?' And that phrase IS.....,'Hey you got a minute?' Uurrgh! It pains me just to write it! You will not see eyes roll any faster in the world than when someone is a recipient of a, 'Hey you got a minute?' And you're always caught off-guard when you get asked it so immediately without thinking you say, 'Yeah sure.' But it doesn't matter because a supervisor is the one who is usually asking this and they know for a FACT that you aren't busy now. He followed you around all day. He looked through your planner and turned off all the phones in the office just to make sure your ass was going nowhere.
And it's never just a 'minute.' The question should actually be, 'Do you have 15-20 minutes to spare because I have a lot of stupid bullshit I want to talk to you about, and roughly 10 of those minutes will be used by you explaining to me why you fucked up.' Most of the time when people hear, 'Hey you got a minute?' they know exactly what the forthcoming conversation will be about. But they will answer, 'Yeah sure' in such a cool and confident manner. They don't want to admit their guilt right away. Like a detective visiting a criminal at his job... 'I don't know what you're talking about officer. I've been here the whole time.' But when you get pulled aside and taken to an empty office like it's a police interrogation room, you brain starts to go crazy. 'Does he know? Did he find out? How? There is no way he would know I wear women's underwear! And if I do, so what?? They're really comfortable and they make me feel super confident and sexy!'
I was recently a recipient of a,'Hey you got a minute?' I had no idea why. My mind was going nuts trying to think about where I could have fucked up. I'm innocent! I didn't do anything! You got the wrong man! But then I started thinking...maybe they are just planning a surprise party for someone. I actually was part of the Party Planning Committee for New Year's. Maybe they were so impressed with that party that they wanted my expertise on another. They probably just wanted to ask me if I could rock the mic for a bit at someone's birthday celebration. I was hoping that would be it. But as two Master Sergeants put me in a quite room and sat on either side of me, I soon realized that this meeting wasn't going to be about me busting out my alter ego as D.J D-Part-z-alot.
I haven't got into much trouble in my career. I've barely even witnessed others get into trouble. A lot of people in the military can't say that. Maybe I'm just good luck. I don't know. I don't have many war stories or seen many crazy things done by others. That's why most of my 'war stories' end up being about porto potties and farting. My most daring and heroic moments are when I have to jump down from a top bunk in the dark. Nothing too exciting. But if I can go my whole career without any serious setbacks and my biggest injury being numb legs from sitting on a toilet too long after eating tampered food cooked by some Pakistanis, I will consider my career a thriving success. The first two 'got a minutes' I ever had in my career were about 10 years ago. These were the first two times a supervisor sat me down in an empty room and tried to break me. Many have tried...none have succeeded.
Part of my job is to empty the bathrooms on planes. Ya. It sucks. It's embaressing. But it needs to get done and every young troop in my job has to do it when they start their career. I could write a couple chapters on Shit Servicing alone but I will spare you the details in case anyone reading this is eating. But to sum up, after every shift you have to make sure the shit truck, with all the shit and piss in it from about 12 planes worth of people, is emptied out. You go over a big hole and pull a lever and a geyser of shit and piss comes flowing out like a brown Niagra Falls. And it's usually at this point, as you stare at the fast flowing steaming gush of human excrement, that a lot of young Airmen in the Air Force start to think, 'Maybe the Army wouldn't have been such a bad idea after all.'
At the beginning of each shift you are suppose to check if the truck had been emptied by the previous shift. This one fateful day...I did not. Two guys I work with went to go take the shit out of a 250 passenger MD-11 aircraft. The truck was still full of shit but they didn't know it. As the new shit started flowing in, all the old shit started shooting out of the top because it was overflowing. Now, this puts people in a very bad situation. Because you WANT to laugh...but you can't. There's a shit truck that's shooting out piss and shit like Old Faithful with two people underneath. What do you do? They can't get away because they are standing on top of the shit truck trying to keep the transfer hose upright so it doesn't come loose. They don't realize that they need to let go and cut their losses because the truck is at Chuck Norris Level....which means it's full and not taking anymore shit. Eventually they jump down and run away and the shit transfer hose pops off and all the shit in the airplane bathroom is now being dropped directly on top of the truck with little pieces of blue and brown toilet paper scattered across the flight line.
The worst part about it is that 250 passengers are just leaving the plane watching all of this unfold. The plane is filled with troops from every military branch all headed to the Middle East. You got Marines walking off the plane getting ready to go to combat and they're seeing this like, 'Fuck...that.' You can dodge a one inch bullet, but you can't dodge 60 gallons of liquid horror dropped from above.
Since I was the last person who checked that vehicle out, I was the one who got in trouble. Though anyone who was there that day and witnessed it later thanked me for a memory they will never forget....except for the two young airmen servicing the plane that afternoon. 10 years later and they both still haven't accepted my friend request on Facebook. Some people just won't let shit go. Aaahh you see what I did? Shit? Let shit go? I ended on a pun right there. Is that smart or stupid? I don't know. But if James Bond and Arnold Schwarzenegger can make a career out of it then it's good enough for me.
Less than a year later I backed a shit truck up and hit a light pole. I put a small scratch on the truck. A truck that already had a million of them and gets filled with shit every day. But I guess my little scratch was the straw that broke the camel's back. I only got in trouble though because I left the scene of an accident. I was picking the shit truck up from maintenance and bringing it back to my shop. That truck was sitting at maintenance inside a warehouse for a week stinking up the whole place with a stench that will linger there for months. No one in the world was happier to see me leave the scene of an accident than they were.
About 5 years go by. I didn't get in any trouble or had any shit related issues in half a decade so things were going pretty well. It was the spring of 2006. I was getting ready to go to Airmen Leadership School. ALS. It's a 6 week course you take before becoming a sergeant. But before the class started, the squadron I was in was going on an 'alert' status and were getting our vehicles ready in case we needed to ship them out. One of my good friends at the time was Mike Tolifson. We were the same age and he recently became a sergeant and I was going to join him soon. One of the vehicles we were looking over was really dirty. So, like the very professional military men we were, we started drawing dicks and writing gay comments about each other through the dirt on the car. Just basic stuff like, 'Mike is gay.' 'Dan is a fag.' You know, all the normal things 15 year old boys say to each at lunch. It didn't matter that we were in our mid 20s and defended freedom for a living.
We would write something, the other person would see it, wipe it off, then write something else. We did this a few times. But Mike never saw the last thing I wrote. We had to leave and I forget about it. I started ALS a couple days later and recieved a phone call. Apparently the vehicle we were writing on was turned into maintenance and the Chief Master Sergeant there, the highest ranking person at the maintenance shop, saw my writing and called my commander. I had to explain why I wrote, 'SSgt Tolifson likes balls on his chin.' Yup. I also had to explain the little picture I drew of a guy with balls on his chin. So that was fun.
That Chief Master Sergeant and my commander wanted me crucified for that. Here I am, in school learning how to be a sergeant, and I'm drawings pictures of balls on people's chins. The biggest reason people were mad was because they thought I was disrespecting an Air Force sergeant. They thought I was just a young airmen who was pissed off at a sergeant and saying bad things about him. They didn't realize we were good friends and just joking around. So luckily I only ended up getting a minimal amount of paperwork, and my only real punishment was to wash 20 vehicles during my lunch break throughout the next month. It sucked. But at least none of those vehicles were shit trucks. Me-1, Karma-0.
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