Let’s start with a quote:
“Luck is what you stumble upon in life. Providence is what God plans for you, and planning is how you thread your way between the two without getting crushed.” First Class Petty Officer John O’Toole, Bosuns-mate USN
The great O’Toole knew whereof he spoke. He spent a career convincing officers that he was the most squared away sailor in the Navy while doing very little other than running a very non-regulation booze distribution routine on cruises, and teaching very junior “drifty-shit” sailors like myself how to “Gundeck” reports ( falsify reports, logs, and other repetitious and meaningless things).
O’Toole was an enemy of the three-hole binder, chapter-by-chapter plan stuck on the shelf. He maintained that it was better to adequately teach people how to behave in an emergency than to have them idiotically pawing through sixty pages of bureaucratese. He could barely restrain his amusement when elaborate plans that no one would read needed review.
The Navy was infamous for having a plan for everything, except maybe what to do if a Time Traveler appeared in the midst of Quarters.
O’Toole eventually retired and took relish in one of his new enterprises reviewing emergency response plans for large corporations.
Discover more from Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver
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I like this guy. I think he’s right about emergencies. I’ve experienced a few and they don’t follow the rules in a 3 ring binder.
100% agree with O’Toole! I was lucky enough in the Air Force to have one of those too. My First Sergeant tested us on how quickly we could look up the regs, and didn’t worry much if we didn’t know answers off the top of our heads. The lesson stuck, and I’ve relied on it. Sometimes when things are stressful, my memory is unreliable anyway.