My short career as a serving commissioned officer in Rumor Control

About fifteen years ago I was a commissioned officer for Rumor Control.

I took the job out of disgust because I was surrounded by people that would hear something going around and didn't have enough sense to check it out. Their whole lives seemed to be based on 'I heard', 'someone said', or things along these lines.

Of course, when I applied, I didn't have to start off as a second lieutenant. I was instantly handed a majority which was considered to be the appropriate entry level rank for a man of my talents.

Now, I had pretty open communication with my port captain and when I heard something going around, I would simply ask him, "What's the story on such and such?"

Generally there was nothing to it or the story I had heard was so twisted that it didn't even resemble what the real story was. Something good in the offing would be twisted into something scary. I recall an upcoming raise that was due and the story I got was to expect layoffs.

A phone call dispelled the layoff rumor AND told me that we were actually getting a raise. It didn't take much. A two minute phone call.

One day I got into an arguement about the rumor mill and told someone that 90% of it is crap. He insisted that he just knew that some thing or another is true. I shook my head and walked off.

Then I sauntered over to another shipmate that was headed out to sea and suggested we start a rumor that we were getting a 10% pay raise and see how fast wildfire really did travel. We agreed that he would let the rumor go at the stroke of noon and I would let him know when it got back to me. That way we would find out how fast the rumor mill worked.

Of course, he started the rumor with the oldest trick in the book. He told the first guy he saw that what he was telling him was a secret and could not be repeated under any circumatances whatsoever. That is guarenteed to get ANYTHING moving.

He was boarding a tug in the Philly area and I was slated for New York harbor. I arrived in New York at 1300 and boarded at 1330. As I boarded one of the offcoming crew officially informed me that he had heard that I should expect a 10% pay CUT.

When I asked him when he heard the story, he told he had heard it about 45 minutes earlier. Not bad. Philly to New York in well under an hour.

Right then and there I knew I had hit pay dirt. I looked at the guy that had earlier insisted that the rumor he had heard about was true. He commented that now things were going to be a whole lot worse with the upcoming pay cut. I told him that the other guy and I had started the pay cut rumor as being a pay RAISE!

He was astonished. I have to give him credit because he learned from that little stunt. He proved to be one of a very few.

One time I bought an inexpensive floral arrangement and brought it into the office and put it on the desk of one of the women that worked there.

With a confused look on her face, she asked me what they were for. I told her that I was putting them on her desk to start scandalous rumors that would go through the fleet faster than a speeding bullet.

Her face lit up and with a big smile, she simply said, "Put them on top of the filing cabinet where everyone can see them." I did.

Rumors ran wild, much to the amusement of everyone that knew what was going on. For years she and I laughed about that.

My all-time favorite rumor was over a sign I had found in my travels. It was a sign that simply said 'notary'.

I hung it on the main hatch and forgot about it for a couple of days and when a shoreside employee boarded he asked me if I would transfer the title to his truck! The two of us in the galley laughed ourselves silly and told the shoreside employee to pass on that in the future all of our paperwork was going to have to be notarized. The rumor went through the fleet like $hit through a goose.

Now, several years ago I had found an old notary stamp at the dump and when I brought the sign on board I brought the stamp. I made duplicate copies of some paperwork and stamped them and left them on the table for visitors to see. Needless to say, someone goofed up and sent one of these into the office and when I got off my port captain held up a copy and asked me what that was all about.

"Oh, yeah," I answered innocently. "You owe me seven dollars and fifty cents. Do I have to fill out a form or something?" The look he got to go with it is that it wasn't going to happen again and he smirked and it ended there.

At that point I seriously thought it would be a good idea to resign my commission, but there was one more rumor left.

At the time I was bringing my sextant to work to brush up on my celestial skills. I was running the coast a lot at the time and would go out on deck and shoot a sun line and plot it. The galley table was generally a pile of plotting sheets and sight reduction tables when we had a little extra time.

My port captain saw me coming to work, noticed the sextant and asked me about it. I told him what it was for and he nodded approvingly. He liked seeing the guys training themselves and showing iniative. Then I gave him a wicked look. "I'm going to start a rumor that the barge guys have to learn celestial so they can tell if they are dragging anchor," I said.

He rolled his eyes and told me that he would brace himself for a bunch of phone calls and complaints if I did that.

I guess some guy overheard the conversation, or actually only a part of it and the rumors started flying.

Anyone that knows anything about celestial navigation knows that is is nowhere near accurate enough to use at an anchorage. I considered myself lucky to get within a couple miles of where we really were. Back in the army I ran a few astronomical abservations using a T-2 theodolite that was mounted on a tripod and had a damned accurate timepiece to back it up and although we were close, I'd have to say that shooting stars or the sun with a hand-held sextant is not going to be very accurate. Cruising sailors today use a sextant as a backup to GPS. A good celestial navigator can get close enough to where he is going to be able to pick out which chart to pull out to use coastal piloting skills to enter a harbor.

In short, the rumor was improbable at best, yet it flew through the company.

My port captain got a number of calls about it. I later heard that several bargees called and demanded to know what was going on. That was no problem as he could quickly dispell the rumor, yet there was something else that happened. A couple of guys, certain that the rumor was true called in belligerently telling him that there was no way that they were going to go to school on their time off and picked a fight with the hapless guy. Over nothing.

What was funny about the whole thing is the way the port captain handled it. The guys that asked him what was going on he simply dispelled the rumor. Those that were belligerent were told that they would be the first to take the class and if they didn't pass it they would either be let go or busted back.

Result: more rumors.

It was then I reported in and resigned my commission in Rumor Control and never looked back. In fact, from then on I tended to be a little more careful about what I said because I then knew how easily things get started. A simple question is often enough to set things off. It doesn't take much.

I had accepted the Rumor Control commission with the best of intentions. I had taken it as an effort to show a few people that they were wasting their time putting any stock in Rumor Control and I'll admit I had a little fun doing it but I had tried to make things a little better by proving that the rumor mill was a lousy source of information.

I had probably done more damage than good.

What I discovered is thet there are people that would rather believe everything they hear that comes down the pike and that making any sort of effort to get the facts would spoil their misery.

Over the years I have had management types tell the entire company that I was working for at the time if they hear something and want it confirmed or denied to simply call, yet few people make the effort. They seem happy being miserable. The concept of finding something out for sure is entirely alien to them and they will go through life clinging to whatever rumor passes by them.

Truth is, the reason I resigned my commission in Rumor Control is simply that I realized that you can't fix stupid.
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my other blog is: http://officerpiccolo.blogspot.com/ http://piccolosbutler.blogspot.com/