SOMETIMES IT'S DIFFICULT TO KNOW IT'S FRIDAY

I'm in the Air Force. I'm in the mess hall. I'm eating dinner with a coworker. He comments on how good the franks are. I agree. I don't think I have ever tasted franks this good.

This talk about wieners reminded me of an experience I had when I worked in a grocery store. I proceed to tell him about this butcher, who every Monday morning would wash the franks left over from Saturday's business in a bucket of suds while singing the Rinso White song. "Rinso White, Rinso White. Happy little washday song."

I told him that the butcher told me they do that so mold doesn't get a good hold on the skin of the wieners.

We finish eating and as I'm getting up, I happen to notice that he didn't eat any more of those delicious franks.

While I was writing this, I remembered another good story, concerning what, I don't know. But what it did was make me realize that it is not memory that gets bad as we (at least I) grow older, it is word association. When we are young(er), one thing reminds us of another bang bang bang. Now, if it does happen to remind us of something and we lose it, going back to the thought that associated with it before, it don't work.

This same phenomena would also account for why it is so easy to lose things as old men and women. We cannot associate the place where we left the eyeglasses with the eyeglasses. All lines between them are kaput, like a communications line cut by artillery barrages during a precursory to a dastardly attack on our weakened lines caused by incompetence at the highest level and the clever spy the enemy employs in a sneaky manner in order to confuse and lull us into a state of false security and hubris.

Rereading the story about the franks, I remembered the story I forgot. This story also takes place in the same mess hall. This time I'm eating dinner with two coworkers who are quality control inspectors. Which reminds me of another story and yet another. These last two stories could get me in trouble if anyone wanted to be a dick, but I would just deny it and they would look like idiots, so that's all right.

So we three have gone through the food line and have sat down to eat. The two inspectors notice that the liver is a shimmering pastel shade of green. They call the head cook over and complain about it. The head cook leaves for a few moments, comes back and informs them that he called the veterinary and the vet says green liver is good to eat.

The three argue some minutes more and while the two are insisting that the liver is not fit for human consumption, I look down at my plate and realized that while they were arguing, I had cleaned my plate - green liver and all. I also noticed that the head cook had seen the same thing, but to his credit he kept his mouth shut and didn't mention it. I saw a small smile at the edges of his mouth, though.

One of the stories I could get in trouble with occurred due to these same two guys. I was working in analysis at the time, helping a Master Sergeant put out a monthly report on the workings of Armament and Electronics section (A&E).
These two looked over our reports and told my boss that one of the trainers seemed to garner an awful lot of maintenance hours. I was tasked to research this and find out why. I did so and it turned out to be nothing more than a reporting debacle. I told my boss this, and I also told the two inspectors this. It didn't help. For three months they focused on this trainer and kept writing it up for excessive maintenance. The last time they did this, I got fed up with it and took all of the maintenance reports pertaining to that particular trainer home with me. I figured,"out of sight, out of mind."

I kept the records at home for a couple of months, heard nothing about it from the Bobbsy Twins (Yes, we actually called them that out of their hearing), finally burned the records in the our fireplace. That fixed that trainer's problem! Never heard any more about it.

I worked swing shift for many years. One of our worst supervisors used to volunteer us Tech Sergeants to clean up the Colonel's office. The Colonel had lower grades working for him, and we didn't work in his office - we worked the aircraft, so this was a real sore point to me.

One night my supervisor told me it was my turn to clean the colonel's office. While I was cleaning the office, I went into the Colonel's files and looked for a twix (a message from higher headquarters giving orders to do something or other. Everything that was done with the aircraft had to have orders given to do any particular thing. No twix, no authorization.) I wanted only one to be in a file, thus depleting the file. I found a file that had only one twix and threw the twix in the trash.

The colonel had two large glass ash trays on the table where he did his briefings and I also took one of those and threw it in the dumpster.

After I had finished cleaning the colonel's' office, my supervisor came in to check my work and asked me where the other ash tray was. I told him I only saw the one. He insisted there were two. Looking him directly in the eye so he understood, I insisted I had only seen one. He never had me clean the colonel's office ever again.