Unfiltered Story #246724

We were having General Quarters drills, and when I got to my station I saw two things that were unusual. One of my supervisors was at my station wearing his yellow “training” hat, and a yellow tag was hanging off of a power panel with some message about a switch being “turned to alternate.”

Me: What? Am I suppose to change this then?
Supervisor: I’m not here. You can’t ask me anything.
Me: Um, but what is this?
Supervisor: You can’t ask me anything.
Me: I don’t even know what this means. What am I suppose to be seeing here?

That’s when the supervisor caught on that I had no idea what the tag was suppose to represent, and he explained what I was “suppose” to be seeing. In this case, while the switch was really set to the “normal” position, I was to pretend it was set to “alternate”. Then, I would report the status to my chain of command, and await instructions etc.

I’m glad he took the time to explain what I was looking at, beyond just “don’t ask anything,” because in the long run when I actually DID have something unusual show up at my station, I knew how to handle it.