This is my own personal account of a person who if he isn't already here in the annals of the Darwin's I'm sure he will make it someday.

In 1983 I was in the Coast Guard stationed at a LORAN station in Middletown CA. A LORAN station is essentially a high powered radio station used for navigation by the military and the public. I was one of the petty officers in charge of maintaining the electronics there.

This posting as duty stations go was pretty nice, beautiful country, a very pleasant vacation area. All of us stationed there generally enjoyed our time and had fun in our off hours. That summer we had a new man assigned, for the purposes of this story I'll call him "Skip".

Skip had come from a boat and this was his last duty station before he got out so he had been in the CG for about 3 years. His rank was a FN/E2 this is about the lowest your rank can be after getting out of boot camp. About the only way you become an E1 is if you get caught doing something wrong and you get busted in rank backwards.

Skip's duties consisted of pretty much all of the work that nobody else wanted to do. This included general clean up of the station.

I said earlier that we were a high powered radio station. Because of that we had two, half million watt transmitters to maintain our signal. These transmitters fed into an space called the antenna coupler room. This room was 20' X 20' with various pieces of equipment in it. The most dangerous of which was the feed to the antenna, a solid copper rod about 4 inches in diameter. Fortunately for the safety of anybody who had to be in this room the feed rod was mounted 10' off the ground with a plastic cover over it to protect somebody from accidentally hitting it and frying themselves. This is how we got the power out to our 625' antenna.

One day Skip was assigned to clean the antenna coupler room. Seeing as this room was air conditioned and it was hot outside Skip decided to turn this into an all day job. An hour into his project I was asked to check on him by my boss so I looked in on him.

I found that Skip had brought a 6' ladder into the room and was standing as high as he could on it so he could "Dust off the plastic box up high". Keep in mind that the plastic box around the antenna feed had so many stickers proclaiming "WARNING HIGH VOLTAGE STAY AWAY" you could barely see the color of it.

At this point a couple of thoughts ran through my head, 1st it wouldn't be a great loss if Skip fried himself. 2nd, Skip doing this didn't really surprise me because of past events in the short time he had been there. After those quick thoughts ran through my mind the last thought was, if he zorches himself I would have to explain it and clean him off of my gear.

Because of that last thought I immediately ordered Skip to get away from the antenna feed and to get down off of the ladder. His response to me was, "Hey, I'm doing fine and this needs to be cleaned. Leave me alone."

At this point I could have just knocked him off of the ladder to get him away from it, but frankly I didn't want to go near him figuring he would take me with him. So I did the next best thing and went and got the station XO to order him down.

I seem to remember after that day he wasn't allowed near anything remotely dangerous and spent a lot of time pulling weeds around the station.

Because this story got a little long winded I won't go into the three cars he destroyed that summer, 2 by accidents and 1 by fire. I’ll save that for another day. I will let you know that a herd of cows was involved though.

Submitted on 06/09/2006

Submitted by: Kevin Baker
Reference:

Copyright © 2006 DarwinAwards.com

James said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
Wow, Kevin, I DO remember this (as I recall, I really liked this story!), but you're right...it isn't anywhere to be found! It may have gotten lost somehow. Anyway, this is an amusing PA about the unit "brick" (ALL military units have at least one). As he was a DA waiting to happen, you did right by ordering him down! I'll keep this as a PA as I am partial to "sea-stories"! Hopefully this time it will stick! :-)

Jorge said:
Definitely Keep: Personal Account
Hello Kevin, we did review this post before. I believe it was accepted.

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