On happier thoughts of electrically messing with people; [Linked Image]

(You're a woman, so don't take this the wrong way, but there is nothing I can not stand more than special treatment of anyone - male - or female)

So, while I was in the service I wired and ran and maintained generator farms for camps, the one I'm talking about now was Mogadishu Airport. I had ~50 generators of varing sizes all over the place there, and me and one other Electrician were in charge of them to power all kinds of things, RO units machine shops, Air field lighting, radar, and general power around the camps, and - Showers. The showers ran off a distribution system that had ~600 tents and a hanger - plus the pumps and lighting for the showers that used all that RO water we made.

Anyway, at the airport we had the only showers for better part of 10,000 people EIGHT of which were women.... So, but decree of our CO womens showers were 7-8 PM EVERY NIGHT. Officers were 8-9 EVERY NIGHT. And the men from about a dozen units made up the rest - ~9,800 people! And they had a schedule so that each unit would get a shower about ABOUT ONCE A WEEK! (Often longer as more units showed up they would get next in, and leaving units would get priority) Get the picture? 8 women every night - and a scatering of officers, if they wanted to - and and roughly 1500 E-9 and below - TIME PERMITTING between 9-10PM having "Navy Showers" which constitutes a drill - shower by command - 1 minute soap, one minute rinse - AND THATS IT - YOU'RE OUT OF THERE! NEXT!

So.... My platoon ran the showers, and and turned the pumps on and off for all these people - Turn them on for the women and the officers - and then ran the drills of all the rest, where they would have to time ech set on and off until 10PM and anyone left over standing in line in a towel was SOL! Because HQ biv was not far from it and it was "quiet time'.... So heres how it started to go. The guy would turn on the pumps for women, and they wouldn show up untill ~730! Then stay in there.... The officers would give the women more time... Then demand that they got more time - which pushed that 1500 guy back until 930, and that only gave them a 1/2 hour. So my guys would show up, and kindly start again for anyone left over at 6AM - which meant that only a few staff NCOs would show up because everyone else had to work... Including my platoon - which put in about 16-18 hour days. So one of the guys and myself figured we had to do something - if not to the officers but to those 8 women who were getting special treatment from them. We knew we couldn't shut off the pumps or run out of water or have it look like we did anything to cause it. So we inlisted the help of motor-T who had a huge LVS truck with conex boxes on it that was really high. Normally it would not be in the camp but we arranged with supply that they had to load some stuff in an area that would take it near our over-head lines. During the day me and the other spark slightly lowered and weakened the lines so they could be taken out later. The showers were on the other-side of the camp about a 1/2 mile away so one of the shower guys would flash a light in a tent to give me the signal that the women had finally showed up mid way between thier SHOWER HOUR, and I would shut off the fuel to the day-tank of the generator that was running, and then give the signal to the truck that would take out all of the over-head distribution for the whole camp right at my generator farm.

I saw the light flash, shut off the fuel it took a few minutes to run out, so I could be seen elsewhere, the lights went out, and signaled the driver to floor it! It took out the over-head, pulled it off the pole, and shredded it out of the transfer panel - the entire camp was in the dark! Looks like an accident.... The women were soapy, and in the dark. And the officers were standing in the dark in towels waiting.... (As they always did, waiting for the women to get out [Linked Image] ) And I put my best game-face on for when the CO showed up in a towel asking when I could get the power back on. "Well Sir, it'll take me and the other guy until about 2AM to get this fixed." Then he asked if I could get another generator over to just do the showers... "Well Sir, it'll take us about until 1;30 to get a gennie on a trailer over there, re-route to feed everything, it's a lot of stuff over there, about a dozen pumps and lights... And still have to come back here to fix this... If I hurry I could get this done about in the same amount of time to get the whole camp." Just fix it.... [Linked Image] Whole camp dark all night. No showers for anyone that night. And only 1/2 a shower for those 8 women. No one to blame but sagging lines and a over-sized truck on a dark road.

After that we started to plant the seeds of disent in the grunt units that the women were taking all the time in the schedule, and finally got thier CO's to go after ours and to move his tent and open them all night long un-attended. And women got shut off if they didn't get out at the right time.

Mark Heller
"Well - I oughta....." -Jackie Gleason