I was running the aft lift coil furnace one day and melting some bronze for a job we were doing in the foundry.
Most of the other guys were doing whatever waiting for the metal to melt so they could get the job done.
An Officer came down the ladder to the lower shop. He was a Lieutenant JG, or "Junior Grade" as the Navy denotes. officers. He was a "Commissioned Officer" and outranked me by a whole bunch, except for a few small details:
I was only A Third Class Petty Officer but I was IN CHARGE of the shop, he did NOT have the training to be there, and he did NOT BELONG THERE.
I believe he was a new member of the ComServGru Three staff that was on board and this squirrel was not in the right tree.
He came back to see what I was doing.
Now, I was running an Induction Furnace and for those who don't know what that is, it is a furnace that melts metal by inducing an electrical current in the metal to be melted and this causes the metal to get hot and uses electricity at a very high current rate of 960 cycles per second. Your home only uses electricity at 60 cycles per second to give you an idea of what I am talking about.
If you get a piece of metal NEAR enough to this furnace while it is running, it will get HOT real fast. That is why I never wore any rings or wrist watches when I ran this thing.
This Lt JG came over and was watching what I was doing. I said, "Sir, I must caution you to not get near this equipment while it is running. It is dangerous."
He replied, "That's all right son. I can handle it. Don't worry about it."
He then puts his hand over the furnace to feel the heat, much as one does over a campfire.
He was wearing a $400.00 Seiko wristwatch with the metal link band and all the dials and goodies that it could have. A nice watch, to be sure.
In about three seconds, that watch got REAL HOT. All the gears and links in/on the watch FUSED together and this guy was hopping around trying to get that watch off of his arm...
The watch band finally broke and he was rubbing his arm and cussing....He had a nice brand around his arm where the watch had been. It looked just like the Seiko watch he had been wearing.
He picked up the still warm watch and looked at it, then put it in his pocket and walked back up the ladder, out of my shop.
Education is a good thing. Rank does have its privileges, but sometimes, not so much.
It is REAL HARD to not bust a gut laughing at times like this........
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