Today was my quarterly safety stand down. A safety stand down is a session where everyone puts down their work and takes time out to review safety training. Since I am the ship's safety officer, it was my responsibility to organize this.
Scheduling a safety stand down for a ship that is about to deploy is no easy task. It requires a lot of prior coordination with people who are having their own issues preparing for deployment, or who are on pre-deployment leave. I also had to fight just to get it scheduled; even though this stand down is a mandatory evolution, ship people just don't seem to appreciate safety as much as aviators.
Anyway, even with all the challenges I was able to put together a pretty darn good stand down. I had a bunch of speakers on different ship safety topics along with videos, and tied together by the ship's audio-visual folks with a sophisticated digital multimedia program. I made sure the training was good to go the night before. It was a lot of hard work, and this morning it was going to pay off in front of the ENTIRE ship, who would be watching it on the ship's closed-circuit television system.
When they played the video this morning it started off well, but when they got halfway through, it was COMPLETELY hosed up. Somehow between the time I reviewed it the night before and that morning, the audio-visual folks completely messed it up, with parts of the training taped over others and no audio. As they tried to rewind and fast-forward it to fix it, they just made it worse, with the whole ship watching.
All my hard work wiped out in one fell swoop. I thought I was going to be golden, but now I am the joke of the day, literally: tomorrow's daily air plan cartoon, which is usually a sarcastic jab at something that happened the previous day, will feature Lieutenant Gange's "multimedia safety extravaganza".
One day I will look back at all this and laugh. Today is not that day.
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