The Needs of the Navy

Anyone connected to the Navy lives and dies by the phrase in today's post title. Military members and their families are constantly forced to rearrange their schedules, change plans, or uproot their lives based on, you guessed it - the needs of the Navy. Today was a perfect example...

NavyGuy called me at home around 10:45 this morning. His squadron was going to be having a simulator demonstration (pilots and flight officers train on a simulator before flying the actual million dollar airplanes) open to the families. The demonstration was due to start at noon... and the base is a good 30 minutes away... sigh. He argued that the reason he had not mentioned it earlier was that it had been canceled earlier in the week, and they had just found out that it was rescheduled for today.

Okay, fine. I'll hurriedly throw on decent clothes and rush down there to meet him at the Officer's Club by 11:45. So I rush rush rush and manage to get to the O'Club with five minutes to spare. I park (carefully avoiding the spots labeled "bigwig" and "head cheese") and went inside to the dining room to find where NavyGuy was lunching.

As I walk up to his table, I see the other guys that I know from his class start to smirk. NavyGuy turns and sees me.

"Uh... you can go home."

"What?"

"The demo's canceled."

"WHAT!!!!!!!!"

Ah yes, the needs of the Navy. Apparently, they had rescheduled the demo, only to find out that the simulator had classified (top secret) instrumentation installed, and therefore civilians could not see them. Of course, NavyGuy only found out this information four minutes before I got there. So, I had left home in the middle of emailing a wedding vendor to drive thirty minutes and see... a cranky NavyGuy (which I could have witnessed at home later without changing out of my sweatpants). The simulator demonstration is "going to be rescheduled" for next week Wednesday, but I'm certainly not holding my breath. That's life with a large, unwieldy bureaucratic institution - the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, the right hand doesn't know what the left foot is doing, and the right foot doesn't care two licks what anything's doing.*

So hopefully next week I'll have exciting news about a Navy aircraft simulator! (Or another rant about inefficiency and confusion.) In other news, I learned where you put oil in a car today! After NavyGuy discovered oil stains on the driveway where I'd been parking the truck, I got a stern talking to about how I haven't been checking the oil in the truck, and I've let it get too low, and now the car might explode into a ball of burning flames (yeah, I stopped listening once he started getting all technical with the car jargon). So then I was forced to tag along to the auto store to get more oil for the truck and told to fill it up before driving the truck again.

Now how in the world was I supposed to know that you don't pour the oil into the little tube that you pull the dipstick out of?!?! Calm down, I didn't actually do it - the funnel wouldn't fit in the hole and I couldn't reach very well so I brought the supplies down and made NavyGuy do it in the O'Club parking lot after the failed sim demo. That's where I learned there's a special opening, large enough to fit a funnel, to pour the oil into. Unfortunately, this now means I have run out of excuses as to why I cannot perform appropriate car maintenance procedures and I fear if I neglect to check the oil everytime I fill up the gas tank, I may be flogged by the master of the house.

Does anybody else "get into trouble" over household chores or maintenance?