Deployment, Day 147 – Dated

The other night while I was on watch as OOD, I was having a conversation with my JOOD and the lee helmsman*. The JOOD was a chief petty officer who is about the same age as me, and the lee helmsman was a young seaman, brand new to the Navy and probably only about 18 years old or so.

I don’t remember what the conversation was about, but the JOOD was teasing the lee helmsman, saying that he looked like George Michael. When the lee helmsman heard this, a look of bewilderment crossed his face and he said, “Who is George Michael?”

Now I don’t really feel all that old, but the people who graduated from high school this year were born about 1988. That means that by the time they were old enough to remember the music of their younger years, it was already the mid-90s, and the popular musicians were people like Hootie and the Blowfish, Stone Temple Pilots, Dr. Dre, and TLC. These musicians populate their earliest memories of pop music as children, right as I was graduating from college.

It makes sense that even though he has probably heard a couple of his songs, my young lee helmsman does not recognize the name. George Michael was well on his way out of the limelight here in the U.S. by the mid-90s. How old does that make me, though, that there are people that are old enough to serve with me in the Navy that are too young to have even HEARD the name? They have no recollection of when George Bush Sr. was president or the existence of the Soviet Union.

When did I become one of the old men of the group? It is not uncommon for me to stand Officer of the Deck with eight other bridge watchstanders and be the oldest one there by several years. Time to go take my Geritol.

*lee helsman - bridge watchstander who controls the engine order telegraph (EOT). The EOT relays the desired ship's speed from the bridge to main control down in engineering.