I was assigned the maintenance desk for several months -- dishing out work order assignments. The Captain's office was right next to my desk, behind closed doors.
Whenever we had an aircraft on the horn (radio) with a problem, he would always butt in with his suggestions, calling them out from behind the closed door. His suggestions were usually pretty silly or simple-minded, but of course, since he was The Captain, we had to relay them until he had run through his repertoire and then we could commence to fix the problem.
One day Maintenance Control called and asked to use one of our two taxis. They had never before asked for one of our taxis in the fifteen years I had been there, so they must have really needed it and we had two that were at the moment not being used, and since I was in control of work orders and knew we wouldn't need the taxis for a few hours, I said, "OK."
I hung up the phone and evidently The Captain had been listening in because he asked me what they wanted. I told him and he said, "Tell them they can't have it."
I called them back and with an excited quiver in my gut because I knew how this was going to come out, I told Maintenance, loud enough for The Captain to hear, "The Captain said you can't have the taxi." The Captain came bolting out of his office and said, "God dammit! Don't tell them that!"
Hah! What an idiot.
We used to clean the area after our shift was finished and this one guy used to always clean The Captain's coffee cup. I never thought too much about it until one day someone told me that he liked to clean The Captain's coffee cup so that he could rinse it out in the toilet.
These stories about idiots that piss people off and then allow them access to their property reminds me of an incident that happened to a neighbor of ours.
My wife used to leave for work early in the morning because she had a long commute. She parked her car in the driveway behind a chain link fence to keep it safe from marauding downtown citizens.
This guy across the street started parking his pickup truck in the driveway so my wife couldn't get out. We would call the cops and they would go wake him up and have him move it. One day I happened to be outside when he parked his truck in the driveway, and I asked him if he would move it, as my wife had to leave early for work every morning and she had been getting to work late because of the delay in getting his truck moved. I really thought that he didn't notice what he had been doing. I was very polite about it. He moved his truck four feet back out of the way of the driveway.
The next morning we found that he had moved his truck four feet forward until it was again in the driveway.
Wasn't that stupid, to leave his unprotected truck on our property, totally at the mercy of whatever we wanted to do with his truck, depending solely upon how pissed we were with his aggressive act? People often mistake kindness for weakness.
I took one of my stone carving tools - a rasp-like thing, and rubbed it along his truck, occasionally having to stop to get it started again, since the point would stick into the metal at times. I think it must have surprised him a bit that I would do a thing like that. Ever after, he would park his truck way down the block.
Oh yeah, besides what I did to his truck, this time the cops didn't just wake him up. They had the truck towed.
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ION, during World War II, General Rommel, fighting the British in Africa, depended completely upon supplies getting to him from Europe via ships. The British controlled Malta, a base in the Mediterranean which was used as a base for aircraft and warships.
One day a convoy of seven Italian merchant ships escorted by ten destroyers and two heavy cruisers left Europe heading for North Africa and Rommel. The British, with two light cruisers and two destroyers, sank a destroyer, all seven merchant ships, and damaged another destroyer without any damage to the British ships. (Ibid. "Panzer Battles" by Major General F. W. Von Mellenthin)
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