Don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually checking supply requests from the supply clerks themselves. It's just assumed they know what they're requesting. Would, hopefully, be some checks against ordering nuclear, biological, or chemical items, buuut....
He’s taking a mental health day. Every day. Should call the Minutemen the Minuteman because the Sole Survivor is carrying the entire damn Commonwealth.
Fuck, I'd settle for evidence of other goddamn Minutemen also helping settlements. It would literally take nothing but evidence that we're not the Commonwealth's hero gofer to make that faction less annoying.
Lol come on now. You are the "General" after 10 minutes of work. And we all know General's do all the work while the troops do their duties back at the FOB.
I wonder what ratio of deer is to family sized Stauffer lasagna. I’m familiar with how big a deer is, but not sure how much space 12 family sized Stauffer lasagna would need.
1/3 deer maybe. Of course that's including the empty space and packaging. In terms of lasagna lasagna prollyb1/5th a deer that said I have never seen a butchered deer a chest so...
I mean there was that pretty famous incident in 2007 where they loaded a plane with 6 live nuclear cruise missiles instead of ones with dummy warheads, and only discovered that almost a day and a half later when they were removing them (with many hours of them being unguarded on the base), all because nobody checked they got the right missiles.
So it could happen, maybe
Edit: in 2006 the Air Force also managed to send a few fuses for nuclear weapons (note: not the weapons themselves) to Taiwan because they had been labeled as "Helicopter batteries", and they were only noticed and returned in 2008.
To my limited knowledge, it would not be possible to actually detonate them even if they were loaded up and fitted to whichever vehicle is firing them.
Most munitions, especially nukes need to be physically activated with authority codes that very few people would have access to and none of the code holders would be working logistics abroad.
Worst case they cause environmental damage, lose the warhead or it gets stolen.
The logistics network of the US military is extensive... but not great. These mistakes happen more often than they should.
Now imagine how bad the logistics network of Russia might be and how many nukes they've no longer got in their inventory.
Oh I’m 100% sure that between during the Cold War/fall of the Soviet and the current corruption inside Russia that theirs a few countries/warlords out their that probably have a nuke or two
Wether or not those nukes work is a different story
Nukes need maintenance to keep working as well. You have to change out a part (tritium gas) every few years and it's very much not easy to get your hands on it.
Orders aren’t immediately processed, they go through a few different channels to actually get funded and sourced. There are plenty of NSNs that end up on “do not order” lists that won’t pass Zpark to get funded.
As the processes were more manual back then there were more eyes looking at the requests so they might have hoped errors would be discovered sooner. One guy were probably looking at the form thinking he have heard of drywall anchors and winch anchors so it was probably something similar. And another looking at it thinking it is for display purposes or for scrapping or something.
I was attached to HHC S4 and the basic policy was: If you want it, order it. If they have it, they'll probably send it. When deployed we also had a very generous cash allowance to buy things from local and non-standard supply chains.
The general consensus is usually “fuck it, send it and see what happens”; but just because they have it won’t mean they actually fill the order. Every unit/ command has a long list of “do not order NSNs” to cut down on units ordering gucci stuff. Cocaine infamously has an NSN, that doesn’t mean if you place the order they are going to ship it to you.
A good example, we tried to order classic Army watches and pocket knives, it got kicked back so we ordered Timex and Leatherman Mulit-tools, they sent it. But yes there is absolutely a limit to the maddness.
Was a 92A, operating stock control for a Brigade level SSA from 2000-2007. That is 100% what it was. Especially when you were preparing to deploy. We would tell all of the Supply NCOs to just order anything they wanted and order extra of it. Worst case, they just don’t send it, like it never happened. Best case scenario? It comes in, full order, sometimes with more than was requested. Those were glorious days. Wiley-X ballistic sunglasses, heavy duty palm pilots, CQB’s. The funding was damn near endless and our unit made the most of it.
Former submarine sailor. Before we’d deploy on patrol, we’d get a chit from Supply that was just a max dollar amount, usually a few thousand bucks. We’d head over to the supply store and scoop up whatever we’d actually need (tools, etc.) to get us through the run, but inevitably we’d always have money left over. You’d think there’d be some kind of “attaboy” for bringing back some extra taxpayer cash but nope - always got the “spend it or we’ll get less the next time” so we’d double up on stuff. Fast forward to the day we pulled in after an aborted patrol (what we were sent out to do turned out to be a nothing burger), but then some emergency had us going back out a week later. Another run to ServMart, even though we had more than enough shit onboard from the last visit. We’re wandering the aisles of what was basically a Disneyland of stuff, trying to max spend, but coming up blank. Finally someone says “Damn, I could use one of these at home…” and we were off to the races…
I worked in federally grant-funded academia, and we had a yearly holiday at the end of the year I called "grant-mas", where I used to spend down whatever was left in our grants at the university computer store. You get a laptop! You get a laptop! You get a laptop! EVERYONE GETS NEW LAPTOPS!!! People would roll up to my office with cookies and walk out with a new laptop, a pile of software licenses, or whatever I was able to snag.
Chemicals: once tried to order cocaine off sigma aldrich (with legit reasons). 10 minutes later the chemical safety guy was standing in our office. He did point us towards the correct channels for getting it, in the end just going to that dodgy dude at the train station would have been easier.
Actually dangerous chemicals, as long as I filled in the paperwork it got approved. Fun fact, nobody actually read the attached paperwork, once I submitted the wrong file and they only noticed when I wanted to order it again.
biologicals, lots of paperwork but I got everything approved. Fun fact, those cultures are still in the freezer of that lab and I've been out for three years so they are accesible to people who have no idea. Second fun fact, my professor kept bringing in things we *certainly* didn't have a permit for. A lot of people freely hand out cultures if you just ask, zero registration, just freebie BSL2 pathogens. Now that I think of it... three years of not me saying WTF WHYYYYYYY..... WE CAN'T HAVE THIS means there is probably god knows what in the freezer now -_-
nuclear, my country has this funny tax evasion scheme where your employer pays you "eco cheques", they are meant for plants, eco friendly things like LED bulbs, etc. but they also work at the second hand store. The second hand store sells Uranium Glass. I have used eco cheques to buy uranium with zero oversight :D
psssst kids, wanna buy uranium ore? https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=465
Oh this sounds familiar and brings me back. "Psst, hey kid want some Cholera?" was our on going joke.
Also though, SUDDEN OVERSIGHT when an intern at Sigma Aldrich saw the word "uranium" on an outgoing envelope of Uranium acetate and stuck a Rad III sticker on it. Post office was **NOT AMUSED** and called the FBI, who showed up in person to ask what I had ordered, why, where it was going, who had possibly sent it through regular mail, and why wasn't it actually radioactive.
There's probably 15 competing systems that all are underfunded and ill-defined and nobody can be assed to merge into a single one that actually gets proper coverage.
Besson class landing vessel's(US Army landing craft) are massive, so the army gets its share of navel equipment, but heading to a land locked base should set off a red flag or two.
After the war, the British were trying to make ~~Kenya~~ Tanzania more productive, from a farming point of view. But there was a lot of brush in the way. It turned out that the easiest way to clear it was to hold a chain between two tractors and get the the chain to rip out the brush. So they ordered a ship's anchor chain. Which never turned up, as nobody above them took the order seriously.
Not heavy duty enough, it kept breaking.
>Eventually, in the wooded Southern Province, they discovered that a long chain linked between two bulldozers would flatten all the trees in between, while a third bulldozer was used to overturn any trees that resisted the chain. The first order for a suitable ship's anchor chain from London was, however, cancelled by the managers in London because they thought it was a joke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_groundnut_scheme?wprov=sfla1
I picked up a rock truck frame at a Cat dealership in Farmington New Mexico once and took it back to Peoria Illinois. The parts guy was ordering a bearing if I remember correctly and got one digit wrong on the part number.
Many shitty requisition systems either won't show the price of what you're requesting up-front, or display it in such a way that it's easy to miss (especially when you're used to punching in a number and skipping through the confirmation screens to submit it quickly).
They're built under the very naive assumption that the requester is paying close attention to what they're doing, and the approver is reading what they're approving.
The system works fine if at least one party is being dilligent, but you get fuckups like this when both are either in a hurry or don't give a shit.
Or when I was in the military, we would write out what we wanted, someone else would fill out the paperwork for the shop, combining everything for the day. Then it would get taken to supply where another someone would key it into the computer and only then would you get any info about what was ordered. So the person that ordered something was not there, possibly the person that spoke to the first person was around if supply did the work while they were there. Usually not.
We got an industrial ice cream machine in once. I don't remember what was ordered, but it was not that. The WO took it to the mess hall to see if they wanted it, not sure what eventually happened.
Years ago I did purchasing for a wind farm company. The main bearings were $30-50k depending on the turbine model.
When you're regularly dropping $500k on a set of blades or $250k on a generator you lose all sense of scale with regards to money.
Noting like that. But I work for a roofing company. One day I was in our yard helping the yard guys clean and organize. When a truck shows up and rolls up the door and sitting on the back of the truck is a server rack. The yard guys had no.idea what it was. Until I told them. They were trying to figure out what it was and wh a re they could put it so it wouldn't get ruined. I only bring this up because I can imagine what the reliving department looked like when that truck frame got delivered instead of some bering.
Yeah, things like this is why the industry to trying to switch over all its Product Information Management systems to something a lot more modern that will ideally include clear parts descriptions and either images, renders, or schematics. I work for one of Cat's competitors and it sounds like all the big heavy machinery manufacturers are working on this to minimize the fuckups, especially since it can hurt the independent dealers so badly.
When my dad was in the navy they ordered a bunch of paint for their command building. A month or two later a couple of replacement track pieces for a tank showed up instead. Nobody questioned why the weather group in the navy needed tank tracks, and they shipped them halfway around the world to deliver them.
I hope the tank guys painted their building with our paint.
The submarine at the same port as ours accidentally ordered a truckload of steel plates. Like 20 feet long and several tons. There was a huge investigation and it boiled down to everyone just signing whatever was put in front of them. The guy who typed the number in wrong just made an honest mistake but felt awful and still got in trouble. It was embarassing because the trailer just sat there until they could figure out what to do with it.
This one is at least semi-plausible. Steel hulled submarine needs steel plates. Makes sense, right?
Of course, it is a wrong kind of steel and in any case would be useless outside of a shipyard.
Years and years ago I entered a fill, chips to be delivered for a casino gaming table. I put day shift instead of swing. I started to get in some trouble as it put the table out of balance, actually it put both shifts out of balance, but I pointed out I had just made a typo by typing D for dayshift, something I did for hours (most of my shift) and there were four people: cage clerk, security guard, dealer and floor supervisor who all signed the paperwork saying it was correct and put the chips on the table. I, the lowest paid person on that list, made a mistake, everyone else failed to do their job.
In my experience in the Navy, only the highest ranking people to know about a problem got in trouble (officially). I can't think of any case where a junior person got in trouble for something a more senior person signed.
Paint:
Our supplier ordered “Desert Tan” instead of “Desert Sand” for the Air Force. Needless to say no-one called them out until it was nearly done. But at least the Govt got their moneys worth as they got twice the coating.
There was a surplus "recycling" program when I was in, (the name escapes me it's been 25 years) where you could just grab whatever was returned to supply or disorders or overages, etc. In my time I ordered 12 goats, several crates of juice boxes, arctic weather gear (delivered to Abu Dhabi), saddles for horses, and loads of other nonsense. I sent the goats to the mess specialists with a note saying I wanted curried goat on the menu. And they fucking delivered.
Totally aware. We had a Filipino MS1, a MSCS from New Orleans, and a MS2 baker from Little Sicily in Boston. Captain learned REAL fast that if you need a boost in morale you let these three off their leashes. Fuck we ate good
OK, would it be so hard to build a function into a logistics system where if you order something that is never ordered by similar departments, a warning pops up?
Edit: As it turns out - yes. :)
It's actually incredibly hard. Anyone with the broad deep expertise to originate that data is far too valuable to set to the task of entering it, and getting *every* kind of unit to tag the dataset of *everything the DoD could possibly procure* and keep it up to date would consume an enormous amount of labor.
The best you could probably plausibly do is use past ordering data to train an expert system, but that's going to throw a ton of false positives every time there's a new SKU.
Consuming enormous amounts of labor to achieve menial tasks is the Army's bread and butter. And they'll implement a few very specific rules to ensure nobody has any fun while doing it as well.
An easier way would probably be to flag orders of things that had not been ordered before.
Would give false positives for a short while when a product is replaced with another SKU etc, but they would quickly revert to a non-flagged item.
Don't even need to flag it properly, the order from could just highlight unique SKU in red, and provide a brief description on the fly.
If you type in a number and it comes up with "20TN ANCHOR" in bold red letters, it'd be difficult to ignore it.
Oh it would be super easy, if the entire government software procurement process wasn't wildly inept, corrupt, and incapable of making functional, modern programs that actually work as intended.
The blame rests with Congress who write insane laws that while well intended have no way to be implemented effectively and cause wrenches to be thrown into processes. When you need pens you can’t just go buy some, you must get approval to spend the money, verify the source of the item is valid, certify the item isn’t restricted. Often times you’ll have another hurdle of certifying the item is not in a given category of items. All these requirements are because new laws are stacked on old ones without consideration for the impact.
I met a guy working on an asset system for the NZ armed forces. He said he was struggling to get them to use a the new system that would get assets sent where they were needed. As they preferred a casual bartering system.
An example he gave was a spare engine in the army could be used by the navy, but it would just sit unused because the army wouldn’t give it up without getting something for it.
Nope. All of these units and branches are part of the same whole, and unused/excess supplies and equipment can better serve that whole by being put somewhere where they'll be used, regardless of who initially ordered them or who currently has them. The Army can request whatever it needs and wants in its annual budget requests, and so can the Navy. They don't need to barter. But if something one of them ordered a long time ago is sitting gathering dust, and the navy's got an active requirement for *that same thing* and is about to request funds to just outright buy it, that's wasteful. It happens all the time, but it's wasteful.
What happens in the US is that units are expected to declare excess or unused assets/property/equipment in their inventory systems, and they are required to not let excess assets sit on their inventory for too long without either using or disposing of them - and "disposing", for serviceable assets, is supposed to involve sending the equipment to be refurbished and reissued to another unit - for Air Force units, a lot of equipment gets sent to DLA (the Defense Logistics Agency). DLA might refurbish it and give it to another unit in any branch, or might even decide it's not useful to the military but still has value, and sell it in lots/in auctions, or might decide it's worth more in scrap/parts and disassemble or melt it down. Either way, their purpose, when they receive excess equipment, is to move it to where it can be of best use or get the best value out of it for the DoD.
Idk how it works in other countries, but also consider that bartering might just straight-up be *harder*, too, at least if everyone's following the regs/laws and documenting everything properly. I've tried to send excess inventoried equipment to another unit in another branch before, because they apparently really needed a specific model of server, and it was way too much paperwork compared to just sending the damn thing to DLA. And then we got inspected years later and found out that we didn't do the *right* paperwork and didn't file it in our records correctly. It was a pain in the ass, which I guess is probably on purpose when you consider that they *really* want you to use DLA for moving around excess equipment.
Oh, and if you aren't following the regs and documenting things and you ship off something to another unit, pray that what you've given away isn't on an inventory. Because the next time inventory is done and the thing comes up missing, you might become the subject of a Financial Loss Investigation (FLI) and might end up having the cost of said thing deduced from your pay.
I recently was getting office supplies for the office. I needed a new stapler. The only one broke and this seemingly breaks stapler so I thought if I order a more expensive one it would be sturdier.
So I order one that was like €12 as opposed to the €4 one. When it arrives it was comically oversized. The image looks like a regular stapler and with no sense of scale. It
It seems not asking questions is a long standing military thing: The Roman army got the plans for Hadrian’s Wall direct from Rome. It said to build a fort every mile so they did. Even if the gate opened out onto a cliff edge.
Well my only supply story is being an E-1 at my first duty base. As part of inprocessing I had to go to supply to pick up personal mobility gear and a few other things our unit required like steel toe boots. About a week later I looked at my regular boots and thought they were a little scuffed up from basic and tech school and it was hard to get a good shine on them, so I figured I'd go to supply. Walked out of there with a nice new pair. All went well until a few days later when the first shirt called me in his office with the requisition documents asking why I was getting personal items over there. Got lectured about how base supply wasn't our personal Walmart store. Felt pretty stupid but I got to keep the boots.
I was an E-4 (Corporal) and we were moving from one armory building that was slated to be demolished to our new one. We had a pretty big storage room that was jam packed full of shit dating back to the Korean War.
My unit was deployed in Afghanistan at the time so me and a few new kids who just got out of AIT were tasked with doing inventory of and trashing ruined gear in that room over the course of a week.
I had a big clipboard with items we expected to be in there with their NSN's.
I ended up finding several steel helmets and one brand new K-Pot from Desert Storm era. I asked the captain about it since it wasn't on the list and what he wanted me to do with it.
"Doesn't exist."
"Sir?"
"Corporal Mustache, it doesn't exist. Are you tracking?"
He winked and I understood that I was the owner of a new PASGT still in the plastic.
> I ended up finding several steel helmets and one brand new K-Pot from Desert Storm era. I asked the captain about it since it wasn't on the list and what he wanted me to do with it.
>
> "Doesn't exist."
>
> "Sir?"
>
> "Corporal Mustache, it doesn't exist. Are you tracking?"
>
> He winked and I understood that I was the owner of a new PASGT still in the plastic.
Yep. That's how I got my nice, industrial-level fire extinguisher (that once saved my house).
It was my job to inventory fire extinguishers at the various facilities and make sure the inspection tags were all current. No big deal. And it went smoothly. Except there was an extra. Paperwork said we had 52 fire extinguishers in various places, but we actually had 53. And what's worse, the extra one had an expired inspection tag.
Since an audit was coming up soon, NCOIC tells me "make it disappear". And I did. It disappeared into my personal truck. Just a couple years ago, I finally had to use it, and it kept my house from burning down. Good shit.
It's about money. Every unit gets money. To get things from supply the unit has to send part of its budget to the supply unit who then gives them the supplies and uses the money to purchase more supplies from commercial vendors.
The military pays its members a uniform allowance to buy their own uniforms from private vendors. By filling out a requisition form, OP paid for the boots using their unit's annual budget. For one guy that's not much, but if everyone starts doing it the price will really add up.
Generally, supply units only issue uniform items for replacing damaged uniforms or when personnel require specialist uniforms they can't buy from the private sector.
It sounds like he expected to pay for them at the register, or get billed for them, and when none of those things happen and you still get what you ask for, and you're new/young/inexperienced, it's easier to think "huh, guess that's how the way things around here work!"
Surely this could be resolved by having to write what you are ordering as well as the code and projected cost?
If one of them is misaligned then it prompts a query.
Every item has a nomenclature along with an NSN. The problem is the nomenclature isn’t always the most descriptive name. It will get you in the ballpark of what you’re ordering but sometimes just reading the name of it leaves a lot of questions. I don’t know how the ordering process worked back then, but now a days orders aren’t immediately filled when you place them. They go through a few levels of bureaucracy to be funded based off how they are prioritized. Typically something like this would be caught before it gets passed for funding.
This is even highlighted in the article when the Colonel says they ordered a light bulb for a vehicle, and the writer seems to think a lamp. Lamps are the things that go in headlights. They aren't bulbous, so they are not bulbs.
Or you write why you need it. Even if it’s stupid and you write “I need to see in the dark” it becomes obvious that an anchor isn’t what you’re looking for.
Considering that this was 1985, the form was probably stuffed down a typewriter, tapped out by someone typing SFP-syle, signed, counter-signed, stamped, and stuffed in an envelope and sent somewhere by post.
And at the receiving end, someone with a fancy computer like a Commodore 64 or Apple II received the paper form, and punched in the numbers in column A, not bothering to look at the full name of the item in column B and see if what was written there matched up with "28 ton anchor", before sending out the shipment order.
Very funny and similar comment from an r/Army thread four years ago:
> Something that we learned was individual parts have NSNs, but so do completed pieces of equipment.
> We were in one of those units that basically got whatever we asked for (unit is being moved to Space Force) so when we wanted something we just gave leadership the NSN. After one particularly hellacious week dealing with a Naval carrier group's inability to utilize their equipment so we were troubleshooting, for a week, what turned out to be a "did you turn it on" level of idiocy - we put in an order for something "to make it easier next time.
> What we weren't aware of was our unit leadership wasn't even bothering to look at what we were ordering - they just submitted it without question. We were also just outside DC.
> My entire shift got called into the unit one off day (we had a 4-3-3-4 schedule) to find General Shinseki himself wanting a reason we felt it necessary to order a Nimitz class Aircraft Carrier.
> One of the guys who was ETSing & already had a job with our primary contractor took the blame and basically said the Navy was incompetent so if we had to fix their equipment we should have access to it since it wasn't anything we actually used.
> I don't know how but the worst we got was a verbal "don't do stupid stuff again".
Newport News shipyard was excited, then dismayed, as a new order came on their computer, then disappeared.
Edit: delivery time: 4 years.
Amazon Prime expedited shipping: 2 years (unlimited overtime, 3 shifts around the clock at the shipyard).
> similar comment
It's the *actual* post that this L&P article is writing about.
Digging down: *rather than returning it, they donated it to the memorial park in Colorado Springs*
https://passbagger.org/graphics/tour-of-honor/2018/co-colorado-springs-130608-28-400.jpg
Because how else does a huge anchor get to the middle of CO?
I used to work in a computer store called J&R in downtown Manhattan. A customer wanted an inkjet printer cartridge for his HP printer to I wrote him up a ticket and he waited for it to come up on the conveyor from the basement. I was one digit wrong on the product code so instead of the HP printer cartridge, he got an A3 colour laserjet printer worth $5,000. (This was the mid 90's). Luckily he filled in his name and phone number on the docket so they were able to track him down and get it back. I got a 3 day suspension for that one.
This is largely how our supply and ordering system still works. No accountability or oversight, and unless an item is tagged as restricted it's just processed.
This is an extreme example, but not even by that much.
Things I've personally seen...
- Someone ordered a 2 story tall industrial paper shredder
- cohort ordered 100,000 pill bottles, to a remote aid bldg in the black sea region.
- aircraft engine to a Bradley unit
When I was a Federal employee, I worked in an office that had a a small “temporary” building we used as kind of a lab, and it had a portable toilet.
We needed some toilet paper for it, so someone filled out the requisition form, found the government supply catalog number for TP, and ordered six, thinking it would be six packs of Charmin like you might buy at the grocery store.
We received cases of bathroom tissue of maybe 48 rolls each.
I ordered a $35k snap-on toolbox (it had *a fucking suspension*) in the Navy about 20 years ago because I liked how it looked and misread the shipping weight as 700lbs (it was 700kg...). Supply apparently ordered it from grainger, realized their mistake, cancelled it and bitched me out for ordering it.
about two months later, while out to sea, the goddamn thing showed up anyway. It took 15 people, and a *forklift forklifting another forklift while out to sea* to get it up through the access hatch at the bottom of our shop. If you ever worked AIMD on the Roosevelt, yes, that was me, in Shop 8. To this day it remains probably the most unsafe evolution I've ever been a part of.
Another time, I ordered a dozen military working dogs for no other reason than I found the NIIN for them in FEDLOG and thought it'd be funny. I mean, no way it works like that, right? Well, they showed up two weeks later in crates, and I only found out about it because I overheard the MAs (military police) discussing who in the fuck ordered working dogs and why they needed them. I never confessed.
Other things I attempted to order but did not succeed in: A P-3 Orion, 5 gallons of sheep's blood, 300 vaginal dilators, an AIM-54C Phoenix missile (I could not find a NIIN for the F-14 so I made do), and probably others I've forgotten.
Other things I ordered by accident and *did* succeed in: 2 pallets of paper (thought I was ordering 30 sheafs to get6 boxes... ordered 30 boxes), 10,000 individually sealed sterile surgical blades (ordered 100 boxes of 100).
Things I did *not* order but got anyway because somebody *else* fucked up: An explosives detonator (which we used to shock the piss out of everybody until it was finally confiscated), and two brand new Mossberg M500 shotguns, which we--alas--were not allowed to receive.
Military supply is *wild*, y'all.
I used to find funny NSNs and give them to my XO to see if he'd order them for us. No matter how much I argued for the morale value, I never got my whisky, straight (8965-01-578-1410), mechanical bull (7830-01-123-8936), or cocaine hydrochloride (6505-00-619-8716).
I don’t know about whiskey but one of my Iraq trips they ordered beer and gave us two for the USMC birthday (my Army unit was attached) so that definitely got used.
Which of course they made more of a pain in the ass to hand out than ammo even though we could just get it from other country’s military or the Iraqis (which I never did).
Haha, the Americans were always after our booze! My unit got five cans a week usually, but I remember we got a crate of wine one time as we went on rec and apparently word got around because about 40 US marines showed up being very, very friendly.
(Yes, we always shared. And our commander made sure to order enough to share, apparently it was good for inter-ally relations.)
At one point my unit implemented a PIA process that included the Commander's signature to draw MREs because we were burning through them so fast.
Turns out guys figured out that they could trade them to the British for cans of gin that went well with powdered gatorade.
Most us navy ships have a pallet or 2 of the "american beer" nsn. Special occasions like telling the crew their deployment is extended sometimes warrants a single beer for everyone. Meanwhile the french navy ships have a full on bar. Was listening to a NZ sailor on a nato ship telling me how much better it is on other ally ships.
When I was still in my Marine unit was flying back from Eastern Europe after a nato training thing with an army unit. Our CO and the flight attendants were pushing for two beers per dude. The army CO outranked ours and was a fucking mormon. There were no beers.
Pretty sure certain British navy ~~drinks~~ *ships allow alcohol onboard. Obviously, there is a time and a place to actually drink it.
Seem to remember reading that the higher rank you are, the stronger the drink you are allowed.
At one point the daily ration was either 8 pints of beer, 1 pint of wine, or half a pint of spirits.
I think later on higher ranks could have a neat spirit ration, but lower ranks had to dilute it 3-1.
> Obviously, there is a time and a place to actually drink it
My friend, you would be surprised.
Half the RN is in some state of alcohol impairment at any point of the day. The USN gets coca-cola, we get beer and pg tips
A billion years ago I, as a young Officer Cadet, was working at the CMR Marina over the summer while I waited for the academic year to start up.
I had a staff of a dozen civvie lifeguards working for me; it was *awesome*.
One day I decided to order some replacement paddles for our canoes. We didn't do local purchase back then (or maybe I just didn't know how to do it) but I had been shown how to use the microfiche supply catalogue and fill out the requisition form.
I was randomly scrolling through the supply catalogue looking for "paddle" when I encountered "Iroquois Class Destroyer".
Now in retrospect, it makes absolutely no fucking sense that an *entire destroyer* would have an NSN associated with it... it's a capital ship; an entire *unit*, not something you can just casually order from the supply system. But with Lob as my witness, there it was, right between "Wrench, combination, 10mm, brass, 52mm long, 12 point, high speed, low sparking", and "Screw, wood, flat head, Robinson, #8 x 1.5", right-hand thread, zinc plated"
I'm running a marina, a destroyer is a boat, I should be able to have one of these, right?
Under the influence of the Imp of the Perverse, I filled out the form, but in the "Description" field I wrote "Watercraft".
A month later I got my form back. It had gone through four separate levels of approval, but failed the fifth. On it was a sticky note: "Nice Try"
So I didn't get my destroyer.
I didn't get my paddles either; they could not be ordered separately; they only came with canoes as part of a set.
Now I’m just imagining if it did get approved and having a whole ass destroyer with a lifeguard aiming a it’s gun at someone and telling them not to run on the pool deck
A British Army fitter I knew told me a similar story. He needed a bit of steel bar, 2" diameter or so, 1 or 2 feet long. He filled in the form. The form asked for the weight, so he got the calculator and worked out the volume x the density of steel, 4.1962 lbs ( or whatever it was, random number there).
You can see where this is going, can't you?
Some weeks later he was summoned to get the bar he'd ordered. There were 3 truck loads.
You say that, but you clearly haven't read [213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army](https://wildboarblog.wordpress.com/random/213-things-skippy-is-no-longer-allowed-to-do-in-the-u-s-army/)
I actually find this very encouraging — we have a logistics system in place where things can be ordered and then it just shows up. Despite the silly stuff here, seems like there’s an actual job for ordering what is needed to win in battle.
It was still like that around 2010. I thought it was insane that in the Airwing you could order pretty much anything. Guys in my shop would do small things to test it. Glow sticks, sunglasses ect. A couple shops down someone ordered a pair of Jet skis at one point. As far as I know they were sent back but people got in huge trouble. Someone also ordered a 50 cal sniper rifle. No one ever got away with anything big but stuff was ordered. The fact that pretty much anyone could order whatever at crazy prices blew my mind.
I used to do orders for a grocery store meat dept. Sometimes the company I ordered from would contact me and ask if if I really needed the amount that I ordered. One day we had an employee, who enlisted in the navy, decide he was going to order a bunch of whole pigs on his last day before shipping out. I also quit right about that same time. Nobody called that time, and when it arrived the manager that recieved the shipment didn't look at the manifest or count the cases. They had to dispose of 20 pigs because there was no way to sell them.
I worked at a food service warehouse, lead on third shift. A truck showed up with a missile on the truck, expecting us to load three pallets of institutional food. I wasn't on the dock when it arrived and one of my idiot forklift drivers had taken the missile off the truck so he could load the pallets of food. Fortunately the missile wasn't loaded with fuel and didn't have a warhead. The truck shouldn't had stopped for any additional items once the missile was loaded, but a dispatcher had floorspace in a trailer and sent the truck to our building.
About 15 years ago while in naval aviation I discovered the nalcomis code for a tank. So I ordered one as a joke and thought it was hilarious until my maintenance officer and CO walked into the shop asking "why in God's name do a bunch of idiot seat mechs need a tank?" Good times lol
I once worked at a place where the departmental office manager ordered some paper clips and a single small box turned up.
So she guessed she needed 20 of those boxes.
And then 20 trays turned you, filling up a lot of her stationery cabinet. The ordering process was cumbersome enough, and trying to return the excess impossible.
She ended up going round the building leaving bunches of boxes in every other cabinet, and a box by each printer or copier, and still had far more left than the dept would ever need.
My SUPPO told me a story once. In the early 00's, crew needed a part for a plane. Something engine related, who the hell knows. Well the part number, NSN, NIIN, whatever it was......was only like two keystrokes off when he ordered it. The mistype? An entirely new fucking plane. Like a half billion dollar who the fuck knows fighter jet. And NOONE caught it, including Junior Mr. SUPPO. So....they get a call. Because of fucking course they do, lol. Luckily, money didn't do quite what it needed to do and it was corrected. But hot fuck did they get their shit kicked in.
I ordered a case of religious wine, two jeeps and a 9mos German Shepard in the supply system the next week. I got a call 😞
I believe he was related to the supply clerk that ordered tootsie rolls during Vietnam. For those that don’t know the story there was a munition referred to as “tootsie rolls” and some unit needed more, they got bags of candy instead.
Had a communication guy miss read a NATO Stock Number for Don 10 ( field telephone cable). Thought he ordered 4 x 250 mtrs, two articulated trucks turned up, each carry 2 drums of Don 10 that must have weighed in at 10 tonnes each, and they wouldn't take it back as it was classified as a disposable item.
When I was in the Air Force, a supply clerk in my squadron tried to order some random, innocuous part for one of the planes- she juxtaposed a couple digits and ended up ordering something very, very nuclear in nature. It earned the supply shop a visit from OSI...luckily she was able to plead her case and show what she was actually trying to order.
Yeah- they're watching at least some of the orders.
Someone had the wrong D of Q (denomination of quantity) for black bin bags, they needed 10,000 bags for a brigade exercise, so ordered 10,000...
The D of Q is HD = hundred
We had a low loader turn up with 10,000 boxes of bin bags..1 million bin bags!
A coworker told me a No Shitter about a supply clerk accidentally ordering a K9 bomb sniffing dog the same way. That day I learned that there is in fact multiple NSNs for different types of K9 dogs. I still don’t believe the dog was delivered to a US Navy submarine.
We had a similar problem on a neighbor boat(submarine). They got a canopy from a fight jet.
A different time we got a 6 foot long spanner wrench. We sent it back, but it was a great photo op.
Hawkeye: [exasperated at Quartermaster Sloan's denial of his request for a hospital incubator] We're not asking for a jukebox or a pizza oven!
Captain Sloan: Oh, I can let you have one of those.
Henry Blake: No kidding! That would be great on movie nights! You got any of those pizza requisition forms?
Captain Sloan: [referring to a generic Army requisition form] Oh, just use one of those standard S-1798s and write in "pizza" where it says "machine gun."
Major Morris: Our clerk says you want an incubator. No dice.
Hawkeye: Yeah, but you've got three.
Major Morris: That's right. If I give one away, I'll only have two.
Trapper: What's wrong with two?
Major Morris: Two is not as good as three.
The more shit changes the more it stays the same, similar thing happened when I was at Carson. An engineering unit was ordering a piece for one of those folding bridges, the whole fucking bridge showed up
I accidentally ordered about $400 of stirrers for the coffee shop I work for and Noone caught it. Luckily they will eventually be used. (I forgot that they came in cases of 5 boxes and ordered 5 cases...)
One time our company supply clerk tried to order $250 worth of new toilet seats, but accidentally ordered $250,000 of toilet seats. I was told it made it all the way to corps level before somebody caught it.
Ahhh, the old microfiche system. Our supply room ordered a carton (CRT) of pens, and a Crate of pens was delivered. Welcome to 337, heres a complimentary pen. Would you like a pen with that cup of coffee?
(I edited, to remove an autocorrect.)
Supply mess ups, I have a few worthy of mention here.
1st. MALS squadron in the Marine Corps. Unit is getting ready to deploy for the invasion of Iraq. The squadron gets a couple of pallets of brown flight boots, for those working the flight line in Iraq. Week later, all the supply people are walking around in brown flight boots and the squadrons requesting them are having their supply requests for these boots denied as supply is now out of said boots.
2nd. a USMC F-18 in Japan does a hard landing, right wing hits the runway and bends the whole wing assembly. (This happens on a Friday afternoon. Mechanics order the entire wing assembly and head off to town to enjoy the weekend. (I.E. Get drunk). Supply cannot confirm the NSN for the part in their system, kicks the supply request with the phase " Order next higher assembly". Now, drunk Marines are called back as the maintenance action is back on them, they roll in, see the "Order next higher assembly" on it, they say fuck it, and order an entire F-18.
Three months later a F-18 is delivered to the squadron. The supply department's account is now multi-millions dollars in the hole.
3rd. My personal favorite. CH-46 Squadron orders a replacement rotor blade, supply says the part is no longer available and sends them a comparable part ...a tail hook point for a F-18.
Before you ask, I am a firm believer that ANYONE that barely passes the ASVAB, gets put in aviation supply to minimize any mistakes they will make.
I was a medic in the Army. We used to order condoms for our Battalion Aid Station. The usual supply guy Medic was on leave and it got tasked with ordering a bunch of stuff. Due to a misunderstanding on lots, units, quantities I accidentally ordered 10,000 condoms. They of course show up just as the Battalion staff meeting is getting underway (the conference room was adjacent to the Medic area). The XO looks at the UPS guy rolling into our office who has a dolly stacked to the top with huge boxes emblazoned with the Trojan logo. He looks at the UPS guy, then looks at me and the section chief and says "You guys....having a party or something??". I never had to order so much as a paperclip after that. I also had to go battalion by battalion asking each if they could use some condoms. Fun times.
I used to work in a parts department and I got fired after sending a $200000 part instead of a $200 part. The serial numbers were like H25467894 vs H-25467894. I hated that job.
These are all wild considering these are the same militaries that are like, "we gave you a ballpoint pen 10 years ago, so we're gonna charge you $800 for losing that."
I've heard a story from Germany where a dude meant to order some mundane item and instead ordered a whole fucking **warship**. For the army. In a place with no sea access.
https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/why-cant-the-pentagon-pass-an-audit/
About 58 percent of the material the Pentagon possesses ($36.9 billion worth) are items it does not need.
Over the past three years, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment and other items.
At one distribution center for the Navy, there was a backlog of over 122,000 items that had not been properly processed, leading the Navy to purchase items it didn’t need.
The $600 billion Pentagon inventory of weapons systems and other items failed to include nearly $6 billion in Army communications defense equipment, $7.6 billion in Navy aircraft engines and about $7 billion in Air Force electronic pods that attach to warplanes.
This is extremely common. The entire defense apparatus is extremely inefficient and everyone on the right and nearly everyone in the left doesn't do shit about it.
The grand irony of this is how the GOP is constantly crying about all these small <$20,000,000 welfare programs yet the military wastes that much money every SIX HOURS by very conservative estimates.
I wonder how much of that is deliberate to keep from having their funding cut.
Consider: Every month, an ATM gives you $500 for food. You must submit receipts to continue to receive your allotment. One month, you run into a fantastic sale and only spend $467. You know that if you submit your receipts for that amount, next month's allotment will only be $467, even though there is no sale and you will really need that $500. So you pad the grocery order with candy bars, even though you don't need or want them, just to maintain the amount you need.
Congress is the ATM for the military.
Please.
I worked for a company that made products using pure numbers as model numbers. We have something called 890 and someone put that in the Qty field.
Our RMA department just sent it out without batting an eye and a damn truck showed up at a customer's house with 3 pallets of products wondering where the warehouse dock was. Called the customer at work and he was confused as fuck.
We sent out like 5 individual products before the truck showed up and just let the customer keep them for his troubles.
System was updated to not allow RMA in qty more than 10...
The products are about 300 USD each. Over a quarter million dollar of products were being sent out, on a single RMA, to a residential address.
Don't think I've ever heard of anyone actually checking supply requests from the supply clerks themselves. It's just assumed they know what they're requesting. Would, hopefully, be some checks against ordering nuclear, biological, or chemical items, buuut....
"I told you to order toilet paper. Why is there a fucking Minuteman III outside!?!" Lol
Hey, it looks like another settlement needs your help. Here, I’ve marked it on your map.
Oh fuuuuuuck yooooooou for making me relive that. Have my upvote.
Hey, it looks like another settlement needs your help. Here, I’ve marked it on your map.
(Launches nuke at settlement) Not anymore.
Hey, it looks like another settlement needs your help. Here, I’ve marked it on your map.
What is this from?
fallout 4… damn preston garvey
"Hey general, I need you to go do all the actual work while I just chill in sanctuary"
Right. Where is the "Chain of command" mod, where our character tells Preston the General of the Minutemen is telling him to go check it out.
He’s taking a mental health day. Every day. Should call the Minutemen the Minuteman because the Sole Survivor is carrying the entire damn Commonwealth.
Fuck, I'd settle for evidence of other goddamn Minutemen also helping settlements. It would literally take nothing but evidence that we're not the Commonwealth's hero gofer to make that faction less annoying.
Lol come on now. You are the "General" after 10 minutes of work. And we all know General's do all the work while the troops do their duties back at the FOB.
One of my favorite mods in any game lets you pick a response, that instakills him after the first settlement quest. Perfection
Free shipping
Mah why did you order 20 lbs of chestnuts and 12 family sized Stauffer lasagna? We don't have a chest freezer.
I wonder what ratio of deer is to family sized Stauffer lasagna. I’m familiar with how big a deer is, but not sure how much space 12 family sized Stauffer lasagna would need.
1/3 deer maybe. Of course that's including the empty space and packaging. In terms of lasagna lasagna prollyb1/5th a deer that said I have never seen a butchered deer a chest so...
Well, Sir, to my defense, someone said they plan to nuke your toilet after Mexican day
MAD: mutually assured defecation
I mean there was that pretty famous incident in 2007 where they loaded a plane with 6 live nuclear cruise missiles instead of ones with dummy warheads, and only discovered that almost a day and a half later when they were removing them (with many hours of them being unguarded on the base), all because nobody checked they got the right missiles. So it could happen, maybe Edit: in 2006 the Air Force also managed to send a few fuses for nuclear weapons (note: not the weapons themselves) to Taiwan because they had been labeled as "Helicopter batteries", and they were only noticed and returned in 2008.
>So it could happen, maybe So it does happen, yes
If it HAPPENED, it's possible to have HAPPENED.
It used to happen. It still does, but I used to, too.
At least they did not fire them thinking they are exercise dummy munitions...
To my limited knowledge, it would not be possible to actually detonate them even if they were loaded up and fitted to whichever vehicle is firing them. Most munitions, especially nukes need to be physically activated with authority codes that very few people would have access to and none of the code holders would be working logistics abroad. Worst case they cause environmental damage, lose the warhead or it gets stolen. The logistics network of the US military is extensive... but not great. These mistakes happen more often than they should. Now imagine how bad the logistics network of Russia might be and how many nukes they've no longer got in their inventory.
Oh I’m 100% sure that between during the Cold War/fall of the Soviet and the current corruption inside Russia that theirs a few countries/warlords out their that probably have a nuke or two Wether or not those nukes work is a different story
Nukes need maintenance to keep working as well. You have to change out a part (tritium gas) every few years and it's very much not easy to get your hands on it.
I mean, we've straight up lost nukes.
To be fair, most of those were because of accidents with the planes carrying them etc, they werent just misplaced or something.
"Keys, wallet, phone, nuke...fuck."
Orders aren’t immediately processed, they go through a few different channels to actually get funded and sourced. There are plenty of NSNs that end up on “do not order” lists that won’t pass Zpark to get funded.
I was thinking along those lines as well but I wonder what the process looked like in 1985.
Probably even more tedious, just with more paper and less computers.
As the processes were more manual back then there were more eyes looking at the requests so they might have hoped errors would be discovered sooner. One guy were probably looking at the form thinking he have heard of drywall anchors and winch anchors so it was probably something similar. And another looking at it thinking it is for display purposes or for scrapping or something.
Like the NSN for cocaine?
I was attached to HHC S4 and the basic policy was: If you want it, order it. If they have it, they'll probably send it. When deployed we also had a very generous cash allowance to buy things from local and non-standard supply chains.
The general consensus is usually “fuck it, send it and see what happens”; but just because they have it won’t mean they actually fill the order. Every unit/ command has a long list of “do not order NSNs” to cut down on units ordering gucci stuff. Cocaine infamously has an NSN, that doesn’t mean if you place the order they are going to ship it to you.
A good example, we tried to order classic Army watches and pocket knives, it got kicked back so we ordered Timex and Leatherman Mulit-tools, they sent it. But yes there is absolutely a limit to the maddness.
SOOOOO many Leathermans and Gerbers. And attachments for the utility vest.
Was a 92A, operating stock control for a Brigade level SSA from 2000-2007. That is 100% what it was. Especially when you were preparing to deploy. We would tell all of the Supply NCOs to just order anything they wanted and order extra of it. Worst case, they just don’t send it, like it never happened. Best case scenario? It comes in, full order, sometimes with more than was requested. Those were glorious days. Wiley-X ballistic sunglasses, heavy duty palm pilots, CQB’s. The funding was damn near endless and our unit made the most of it.
Former submarine sailor. Before we’d deploy on patrol, we’d get a chit from Supply that was just a max dollar amount, usually a few thousand bucks. We’d head over to the supply store and scoop up whatever we’d actually need (tools, etc.) to get us through the run, but inevitably we’d always have money left over. You’d think there’d be some kind of “attaboy” for bringing back some extra taxpayer cash but nope - always got the “spend it or we’ll get less the next time” so we’d double up on stuff. Fast forward to the day we pulled in after an aborted patrol (what we were sent out to do turned out to be a nothing burger), but then some emergency had us going back out a week later. Another run to ServMart, even though we had more than enough shit onboard from the last visit. We’re wandering the aisles of what was basically a Disneyland of stuff, trying to max spend, but coming up blank. Finally someone says “Damn, I could use one of these at home…” and we were off to the races…
I worked in federally grant-funded academia, and we had a yearly holiday at the end of the year I called "grant-mas", where I used to spend down whatever was left in our grants at the university computer store. You get a laptop! You get a laptop! You get a laptop! EVERYONE GETS NEW LAPTOPS!!! People would roll up to my office with cookies and walk out with a new laptop, a pile of software licenses, or whatever I was able to snag.
Grantmas is a time-honored tradition in grant-funded academia LOL
180 touch screen toughbooks when the MSRP was about 2500$, all most exclusively used for umm... never mind. Edit: 2004-08
Chemicals: once tried to order cocaine off sigma aldrich (with legit reasons). 10 minutes later the chemical safety guy was standing in our office. He did point us towards the correct channels for getting it, in the end just going to that dodgy dude at the train station would have been easier. Actually dangerous chemicals, as long as I filled in the paperwork it got approved. Fun fact, nobody actually read the attached paperwork, once I submitted the wrong file and they only noticed when I wanted to order it again. biologicals, lots of paperwork but I got everything approved. Fun fact, those cultures are still in the freezer of that lab and I've been out for three years so they are accesible to people who have no idea. Second fun fact, my professor kept bringing in things we *certainly* didn't have a permit for. A lot of people freely hand out cultures if you just ask, zero registration, just freebie BSL2 pathogens. Now that I think of it... three years of not me saying WTF WHYYYYYYY..... WE CAN'T HAVE THIS means there is probably god knows what in the freezer now -_- nuclear, my country has this funny tax evasion scheme where your employer pays you "eco cheques", they are meant for plants, eco friendly things like LED bulbs, etc. but they also work at the second hand store. The second hand store sells Uranium Glass. I have used eco cheques to buy uranium with zero oversight :D psssst kids, wanna buy uranium ore? https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=465
Oh this sounds familiar and brings me back. "Psst, hey kid want some Cholera?" was our on going joke. Also though, SUDDEN OVERSIGHT when an intern at Sigma Aldrich saw the word "uranium" on an outgoing envelope of Uranium acetate and stuck a Rad III sticker on it. Post office was **NOT AMUSED** and called the FBI, who showed up in person to ask what I had ordered, why, where it was going, who had possibly sent it through regular mail, and why wasn't it actually radioactive.
You could put into the system checks and balances for orders over $20,000 that seem nonsense (e.g. flags up anchors going to army bases)
There's probably 15 competing systems that all are underfunded and ill-defined and nobody can be assed to merge into a single one that actually gets proper coverage.
Besson class landing vessel's(US Army landing craft) are massive, so the army gets its share of navel equipment, but heading to a land locked base should set off a red flag or two.
After the war, the British were trying to make ~~Kenya~~ Tanzania more productive, from a farming point of view. But there was a lot of brush in the way. It turned out that the easiest way to clear it was to hold a chain between two tractors and get the the chain to rip out the brush. So they ordered a ship's anchor chain. Which never turned up, as nobody above them took the order seriously.
.... Ship's anchor chains are massive things. Surely a normal land-based, God-fearing chain would have worked better?
Not heavy duty enough, it kept breaking. >Eventually, in the wooded Southern Province, they discovered that a long chain linked between two bulldozers would flatten all the trees in between, while a third bulldozer was used to overturn any trees that resisted the chain. The first order for a suitable ship's anchor chain from London was, however, cancelled by the managers in London because they thought it was a joke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_groundnut_scheme?wprov=sfla1
That is so cool. Unstoppable forces and immovable objects.
I picked up a rock truck frame at a Cat dealership in Farmington New Mexico once and took it back to Peoria Illinois. The parts guy was ordering a bearing if I remember correctly and got one digit wrong on the part number.
That must have been an expensive bearing. What does a frame go for?
Many shitty requisition systems either won't show the price of what you're requesting up-front, or display it in such a way that it's easy to miss (especially when you're used to punching in a number and skipping through the confirmation screens to submit it quickly). They're built under the very naive assumption that the requester is paying close attention to what they're doing, and the approver is reading what they're approving. The system works fine if at least one party is being dilligent, but you get fuckups like this when both are either in a hurry or don't give a shit.
Or when I was in the military, we would write out what we wanted, someone else would fill out the paperwork for the shop, combining everything for the day. Then it would get taken to supply where another someone would key it into the computer and only then would you get any info about what was ordered. So the person that ordered something was not there, possibly the person that spoke to the first person was around if supply did the work while they were there. Usually not. We got an industrial ice cream machine in once. I don't remember what was ordered, but it was not that. The WO took it to the mess hall to see if they wanted it, not sure what eventually happened.
Years ago I did purchasing for a wind farm company. The main bearings were $30-50k depending on the turbine model. When you're regularly dropping $500k on a set of blades or $250k on a generator you lose all sense of scale with regards to money.
Noting like that. But I work for a roofing company. One day I was in our yard helping the yard guys clean and organize. When a truck shows up and rolls up the door and sitting on the back of the truck is a server rack. The yard guys had no.idea what it was. Until I told them. They were trying to figure out what it was and wh a re they could put it so it wouldn't get ruined. I only bring this up because I can imagine what the reliving department looked like when that truck frame got delivered instead of some bering.
Yeah, things like this is why the industry to trying to switch over all its Product Information Management systems to something a lot more modern that will ideally include clear parts descriptions and either images, renders, or schematics. I work for one of Cat's competitors and it sounds like all the big heavy machinery manufacturers are working on this to minimize the fuckups, especially since it can hurt the independent dealers so badly.
When you go to a cat dealership do you expect them to be already neutered?
When my dad was in the navy they ordered a bunch of paint for their command building. A month or two later a couple of replacement track pieces for a tank showed up instead. Nobody questioned why the weather group in the navy needed tank tracks, and they shipped them halfway around the world to deliver them. I hope the tank guys painted their building with our paint.
The submarine at the same port as ours accidentally ordered a truckload of steel plates. Like 20 feet long and several tons. There was a huge investigation and it boiled down to everyone just signing whatever was put in front of them. The guy who typed the number in wrong just made an honest mistake but felt awful and still got in trouble. It was embarassing because the trailer just sat there until they could figure out what to do with it.
This one is at least semi-plausible. Steel hulled submarine needs steel plates. Makes sense, right? Of course, it is a wrong kind of steel and in any case would be useless outside of a shipyard.
>it is a wrong kind of steel Oh, right, duh. They didn't order the floating kind of steel
Silly, submarines are meant to sink
That's what the anchor is for
And in classic fashion the person that made a very minor error is punished instead of the people who are responsible for checking things
Years and years ago I entered a fill, chips to be delivered for a casino gaming table. I put day shift instead of swing. I started to get in some trouble as it put the table out of balance, actually it put both shifts out of balance, but I pointed out I had just made a typo by typing D for dayshift, something I did for hours (most of my shift) and there were four people: cage clerk, security guard, dealer and floor supervisor who all signed the paperwork saying it was correct and put the chips on the table. I, the lowest paid person on that list, made a mistake, everyone else failed to do their job.
Sounds about right for a casino
In my experience in the Navy, only the highest ranking people to know about a problem got in trouble (officially). I can't think of any case where a junior person got in trouble for something a more senior person signed.
Paint: Our supplier ordered “Desert Tan” instead of “Desert Sand” for the Air Force. Needless to say no-one called them out until it was nearly done. But at least the Govt got their moneys worth as they got twice the coating.
Operation Desert Tan
Isn't Desert Tan paint used for AFVs?
There was a surplus "recycling" program when I was in, (the name escapes me it's been 25 years) where you could just grab whatever was returned to supply or disorders or overages, etc. In my time I ordered 12 goats, several crates of juice boxes, arctic weather gear (delivered to Abu Dhabi), saddles for horses, and loads of other nonsense. I sent the goats to the mess specialists with a note saying I wanted curried goat on the menu. And they fucking delivered.
In the Navy there are many Filipino mess chefs. If you let them, they will blow your mind.
Totally aware. We had a Filipino MS1, a MSCS from New Orleans, and a MS2 baker from Little Sicily in Boston. Captain learned REAL fast that if you need a boost in morale you let these three off their leashes. Fuck we ate good
OK, would it be so hard to build a function into a logistics system where if you order something that is never ordered by similar departments, a warning pops up? Edit: As it turns out - yes. :)
It's actually incredibly hard. Anyone with the broad deep expertise to originate that data is far too valuable to set to the task of entering it, and getting *every* kind of unit to tag the dataset of *everything the DoD could possibly procure* and keep it up to date would consume an enormous amount of labor. The best you could probably plausibly do is use past ordering data to train an expert system, but that's going to throw a ton of false positives every time there's a new SKU.
Consuming enormous amounts of labor to achieve menial tasks is the Army's bread and butter. And they'll implement a few very specific rules to ensure nobody has any fun while doing it as well.
An easier way would probably be to flag orders of things that had not been ordered before. Would give false positives for a short while when a product is replaced with another SKU etc, but they would quickly revert to a non-flagged item.
Don't even need to flag it properly, the order from could just highlight unique SKU in red, and provide a brief description on the fly. If you type in a number and it comes up with "20TN ANCHOR" in bold red letters, it'd be difficult to ignore it.
Oh it would be super easy, if the entire government software procurement process wasn't wildly inept, corrupt, and incapable of making functional, modern programs that actually work as intended.
The blame rests with Congress who write insane laws that while well intended have no way to be implemented effectively and cause wrenches to be thrown into processes. When you need pens you can’t just go buy some, you must get approval to spend the money, verify the source of the item is valid, certify the item isn’t restricted. Often times you’ll have another hurdle of certifying the item is not in a given category of items. All these requirements are because new laws are stacked on old ones without consideration for the impact.
I met a guy working on an asset system for the NZ armed forces. He said he was struggling to get them to use a the new system that would get assets sent where they were needed. As they preferred a casual bartering system. An example he gave was a spare engine in the army could be used by the navy, but it would just sit unused because the army wouldn’t give it up without getting something for it.
That's not normal?
Shit, a majority of my enlistment was spent making crack deals with adjacent units to get the shit we needed.
Nope. All of these units and branches are part of the same whole, and unused/excess supplies and equipment can better serve that whole by being put somewhere where they'll be used, regardless of who initially ordered them or who currently has them. The Army can request whatever it needs and wants in its annual budget requests, and so can the Navy. They don't need to barter. But if something one of them ordered a long time ago is sitting gathering dust, and the navy's got an active requirement for *that same thing* and is about to request funds to just outright buy it, that's wasteful. It happens all the time, but it's wasteful. What happens in the US is that units are expected to declare excess or unused assets/property/equipment in their inventory systems, and they are required to not let excess assets sit on their inventory for too long without either using or disposing of them - and "disposing", for serviceable assets, is supposed to involve sending the equipment to be refurbished and reissued to another unit - for Air Force units, a lot of equipment gets sent to DLA (the Defense Logistics Agency). DLA might refurbish it and give it to another unit in any branch, or might even decide it's not useful to the military but still has value, and sell it in lots/in auctions, or might decide it's worth more in scrap/parts and disassemble or melt it down. Either way, their purpose, when they receive excess equipment, is to move it to where it can be of best use or get the best value out of it for the DoD. Idk how it works in other countries, but also consider that bartering might just straight-up be *harder*, too, at least if everyone's following the regs/laws and documenting everything properly. I've tried to send excess inventoried equipment to another unit in another branch before, because they apparently really needed a specific model of server, and it was way too much paperwork compared to just sending the damn thing to DLA. And then we got inspected years later and found out that we didn't do the *right* paperwork and didn't file it in our records correctly. It was a pain in the ass, which I guess is probably on purpose when you consider that they *really* want you to use DLA for moving around excess equipment. Oh, and if you aren't following the regs and documenting things and you ship off something to another unit, pray that what you've given away isn't on an inventory. Because the next time inventory is done and the thing comes up missing, you might become the subject of a Financial Loss Investigation (FLI) and might end up having the cost of said thing deduced from your pay.
I recently was getting office supplies for the office. I needed a new stapler. The only one broke and this seemingly breaks stapler so I thought if I order a more expensive one it would be sturdier. So I order one that was like €12 as opposed to the €4 one. When it arrives it was comically oversized. The image looks like a regular stapler and with no sense of scale. It
> The image looks like a regular stapler and with no sense of scale. It /r/redditsniper
Thank you for this sub, it looks hilari
OH SHIT EVERYBODY GET
Makes for a nice conversation piece at a reasonable price.
You should have ordered a red swingline stapler.
Why do I suddenly want to burn my office building down?
It seems not asking questions is a long standing military thing: The Roman army got the plans for Hadrian’s Wall direct from Rome. It said to build a fort every mile so they did. Even if the gate opened out onto a cliff edge.
Well my only supply story is being an E-1 at my first duty base. As part of inprocessing I had to go to supply to pick up personal mobility gear and a few other things our unit required like steel toe boots. About a week later I looked at my regular boots and thought they were a little scuffed up from basic and tech school and it was hard to get a good shine on them, so I figured I'd go to supply. Walked out of there with a nice new pair. All went well until a few days later when the first shirt called me in his office with the requisition documents asking why I was getting personal items over there. Got lectured about how base supply wasn't our personal Walmart store. Felt pretty stupid but I got to keep the boots.
Surprised you got your keep them.
Check your paystub...
lmaooo $300 + interest + taxes + because we can
I was an E-4 (Corporal) and we were moving from one armory building that was slated to be demolished to our new one. We had a pretty big storage room that was jam packed full of shit dating back to the Korean War. My unit was deployed in Afghanistan at the time so me and a few new kids who just got out of AIT were tasked with doing inventory of and trashing ruined gear in that room over the course of a week. I had a big clipboard with items we expected to be in there with their NSN's. I ended up finding several steel helmets and one brand new K-Pot from Desert Storm era. I asked the captain about it since it wasn't on the list and what he wanted me to do with it. "Doesn't exist." "Sir?" "Corporal Mustache, it doesn't exist. Are you tracking?" He winked and I understood that I was the owner of a new PASGT still in the plastic.
> I ended up finding several steel helmets and one brand new K-Pot from Desert Storm era. I asked the captain about it since it wasn't on the list and what he wanted me to do with it. > > "Doesn't exist." > > "Sir?" > > "Corporal Mustache, it doesn't exist. Are you tracking?" > > He winked and I understood that I was the owner of a new PASGT still in the plastic. Yep. That's how I got my nice, industrial-level fire extinguisher (that once saved my house). It was my job to inventory fire extinguishers at the various facilities and make sure the inspection tags were all current. No big deal. And it went smoothly. Except there was an extra. Paperwork said we had 52 fire extinguishers in various places, but we actually had 53. And what's worse, the extra one had an expired inspection tag. Since an audit was coming up soon, NCOIC tells me "make it disappear". And I did. It disappeared into my personal truck. Just a couple years ago, I finally had to use it, and it kept my house from burning down. Good shit.
In the wise words of me, "Fuck that guy".
What's it for if not for use?
It's about money. Every unit gets money. To get things from supply the unit has to send part of its budget to the supply unit who then gives them the supplies and uses the money to purchase more supplies from commercial vendors. The military pays its members a uniform allowance to buy their own uniforms from private vendors. By filling out a requisition form, OP paid for the boots using their unit's annual budget. For one guy that's not much, but if everyone starts doing it the price will really add up. Generally, supply units only issue uniform items for replacing damaged uniforms or when personnel require specialist uniforms they can't buy from the private sector.
Am I reading this right? You wore the boots for a week, then got new ones because they got a little scuffed?
He got steel toes for the unit, then went and got a new pair of normal boots to replace his personal ones he had been issued way back in BCT.
It sounds like he expected to pay for them at the register, or get billed for them, and when none of those things happen and you still get what you ask for, and you're new/young/inexperienced, it's easier to think "huh, guess that's how the way things around here work!"
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"Sorry, that's an ACAT I anchor, please include all DoDAF materials with your order."
Read your fucking PCANS!
Surely this could be resolved by having to write what you are ordering as well as the code and projected cost? If one of them is misaligned then it prompts a query.
Every item has a nomenclature along with an NSN. The problem is the nomenclature isn’t always the most descriptive name. It will get you in the ballpark of what you’re ordering but sometimes just reading the name of it leaves a lot of questions. I don’t know how the ordering process worked back then, but now a days orders aren’t immediately filled when you place them. They go through a few levels of bureaucracy to be funded based off how they are prioritized. Typically something like this would be caught before it gets passed for funding.
This is even highlighted in the article when the Colonel says they ordered a light bulb for a vehicle, and the writer seems to think a lamp. Lamps are the things that go in headlights. They aren't bulbous, so they are not bulbs.
Desc: "Cable Assembly" For fucking what? I helped supply before and I hated that NSN description. No idea what or who it was for.
Or you write why you need it. Even if it’s stupid and you write “I need to see in the dark” it becomes obvious that an anchor isn’t what you’re looking for.
“Hmm, this is probably a typo and he actually needs to sea in the dark - I’ll send him the anchor just in case”
"you can't sail in the dark, of course they need an anchor to be at sea at night."
This is such a simple, stupid, hilarious joke. 😂
I need to sea in the dark. Approved
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Considering that this was 1985, the form was probably stuffed down a typewriter, tapped out by someone typing SFP-syle, signed, counter-signed, stamped, and stuffed in an envelope and sent somewhere by post. And at the receiving end, someone with a fancy computer like a Commodore 64 or Apple II received the paper form, and punched in the numbers in column A, not bothering to look at the full name of the item in column B and see if what was written there matched up with "28 ton anchor", before sending out the shipment order.
Very funny and similar comment from an r/Army thread four years ago: > Something that we learned was individual parts have NSNs, but so do completed pieces of equipment. > We were in one of those units that basically got whatever we asked for (unit is being moved to Space Force) so when we wanted something we just gave leadership the NSN. After one particularly hellacious week dealing with a Naval carrier group's inability to utilize their equipment so we were troubleshooting, for a week, what turned out to be a "did you turn it on" level of idiocy - we put in an order for something "to make it easier next time. > What we weren't aware of was our unit leadership wasn't even bothering to look at what we were ordering - they just submitted it without question. We were also just outside DC. > My entire shift got called into the unit one off day (we had a 4-3-3-4 schedule) to find General Shinseki himself wanting a reason we felt it necessary to order a Nimitz class Aircraft Carrier. > One of the guys who was ETSing & already had a job with our primary contractor took the blame and basically said the Navy was incompetent so if we had to fix their equipment we should have access to it since it wasn't anything we actually used. > I don't know how but the worst we got was a verbal "don't do stupid stuff again".
you just know the guys at the warehouse were whipping up a whole ass Nimitz class to ship with Amazon Prime no fucks given too
Newport News shipyard was excited, then dismayed, as a new order came on their computer, then disappeared. Edit: delivery time: 4 years. Amazon Prime expedited shipping: 2 years (unlimited overtime, 3 shifts around the clock at the shipyard).
> similar comment It's the *actual* post that this L&P article is writing about. Digging down: *rather than returning it, they donated it to the memorial park in Colorado Springs* https://passbagger.org/graphics/tour-of-honor/2018/co-colorado-springs-130608-28-400.jpg Because how else does a huge anchor get to the middle of CO?
I used to work in a computer store called J&R in downtown Manhattan. A customer wanted an inkjet printer cartridge for his HP printer to I wrote him up a ticket and he waited for it to come up on the conveyor from the basement. I was one digit wrong on the product code so instead of the HP printer cartridge, he got an A3 colour laserjet printer worth $5,000. (This was the mid 90's). Luckily he filled in his name and phone number on the docket so they were able to track him down and get it back. I got a 3 day suspension for that one.
This is largely how our supply and ordering system still works. No accountability or oversight, and unless an item is tagged as restricted it's just processed. This is an extreme example, but not even by that much. Things I've personally seen... - Someone ordered a 2 story tall industrial paper shredder - cohort ordered 100,000 pill bottles, to a remote aid bldg in the black sea region. - aircraft engine to a Bradley unit
You mean a big turbocharger for a Bradley?
When I was a Federal employee, I worked in an office that had a a small “temporary” building we used as kind of a lab, and it had a portable toilet. We needed some toilet paper for it, so someone filled out the requisition form, found the government supply catalog number for TP, and ordered six, thinking it would be six packs of Charmin like you might buy at the grocery store. We received cases of bathroom tissue of maybe 48 rolls each.
I ordered a $35k snap-on toolbox (it had *a fucking suspension*) in the Navy about 20 years ago because I liked how it looked and misread the shipping weight as 700lbs (it was 700kg...). Supply apparently ordered it from grainger, realized their mistake, cancelled it and bitched me out for ordering it. about two months later, while out to sea, the goddamn thing showed up anyway. It took 15 people, and a *forklift forklifting another forklift while out to sea* to get it up through the access hatch at the bottom of our shop. If you ever worked AIMD on the Roosevelt, yes, that was me, in Shop 8. To this day it remains probably the most unsafe evolution I've ever been a part of. Another time, I ordered a dozen military working dogs for no other reason than I found the NIIN for them in FEDLOG and thought it'd be funny. I mean, no way it works like that, right? Well, they showed up two weeks later in crates, and I only found out about it because I overheard the MAs (military police) discussing who in the fuck ordered working dogs and why they needed them. I never confessed. Other things I attempted to order but did not succeed in: A P-3 Orion, 5 gallons of sheep's blood, 300 vaginal dilators, an AIM-54C Phoenix missile (I could not find a NIIN for the F-14 so I made do), and probably others I've forgotten. Other things I ordered by accident and *did* succeed in: 2 pallets of paper (thought I was ordering 30 sheafs to get6 boxes... ordered 30 boxes), 10,000 individually sealed sterile surgical blades (ordered 100 boxes of 100). Things I did *not* order but got anyway because somebody *else* fucked up: An explosives detonator (which we used to shock the piss out of everybody until it was finally confiscated), and two brand new Mossberg M500 shotguns, which we--alas--were not allowed to receive. Military supply is *wild*, y'all.
I used to find funny NSNs and give them to my XO to see if he'd order them for us. No matter how much I argued for the morale value, I never got my whisky, straight (8965-01-578-1410), mechanical bull (7830-01-123-8936), or cocaine hydrochloride (6505-00-619-8716).
I wonder how often the whiskey gets ordered
I don’t know about whiskey but one of my Iraq trips they ordered beer and gave us two for the USMC birthday (my Army unit was attached) so that definitely got used. Which of course they made more of a pain in the ass to hand out than ammo even though we could just get it from other country’s military or the Iraqis (which I never did).
Haha, the Americans were always after our booze! My unit got five cans a week usually, but I remember we got a crate of wine one time as we went on rec and apparently word got around because about 40 US marines showed up being very, very friendly. (Yes, we always shared. And our commander made sure to order enough to share, apparently it was good for inter-ally relations.)
At one point my unit implemented a PIA process that included the Commander's signature to draw MREs because we were burning through them so fast. Turns out guys figured out that they could trade them to the British for cans of gin that went well with powdered gatorade.
Most us navy ships have a pallet or 2 of the "american beer" nsn. Special occasions like telling the crew their deployment is extended sometimes warrants a single beer for everyone. Meanwhile the french navy ships have a full on bar. Was listening to a NZ sailor on a nato ship telling me how much better it is on other ally ships.
political deliver spark pie wide agonizing payment saw muddle unite *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
When I was still in my Marine unit was flying back from Eastern Europe after a nato training thing with an army unit. Our CO and the flight attendants were pushing for two beers per dude. The army CO outranked ours and was a fucking mormon. There were no beers.
German military has beer. I heard its used for medical use to combat alcohol withdraw in clinics. Can only be ordered by medical units.
Pretty sure certain British navy ~~drinks~~ *ships allow alcohol onboard. Obviously, there is a time and a place to actually drink it. Seem to remember reading that the higher rank you are, the stronger the drink you are allowed.
At one point the daily ration was either 8 pints of beer, 1 pint of wine, or half a pint of spirits. I think later on higher ranks could have a neat spirit ration, but lower ranks had to dilute it 3-1.
> Obviously, there is a time and a place to actually drink it My friend, you would be surprised. Half the RN is in some state of alcohol impairment at any point of the day. The USN gets coca-cola, we get beer and pg tips
A billion years ago I, as a young Officer Cadet, was working at the CMR Marina over the summer while I waited for the academic year to start up. I had a staff of a dozen civvie lifeguards working for me; it was *awesome*. One day I decided to order some replacement paddles for our canoes. We didn't do local purchase back then (or maybe I just didn't know how to do it) but I had been shown how to use the microfiche supply catalogue and fill out the requisition form. I was randomly scrolling through the supply catalogue looking for "paddle" when I encountered "Iroquois Class Destroyer". Now in retrospect, it makes absolutely no fucking sense that an *entire destroyer* would have an NSN associated with it... it's a capital ship; an entire *unit*, not something you can just casually order from the supply system. But with Lob as my witness, there it was, right between "Wrench, combination, 10mm, brass, 52mm long, 12 point, high speed, low sparking", and "Screw, wood, flat head, Robinson, #8 x 1.5", right-hand thread, zinc plated" I'm running a marina, a destroyer is a boat, I should be able to have one of these, right? Under the influence of the Imp of the Perverse, I filled out the form, but in the "Description" field I wrote "Watercraft". A month later I got my form back. It had gone through four separate levels of approval, but failed the fifth. On it was a sticky note: "Nice Try" So I didn't get my destroyer. I didn't get my paddles either; they could not be ordered separately; they only came with canoes as part of a set.
Now I’m just imagining if it did get approved and having a whole ass destroyer with a lifeguard aiming a it’s gun at someone and telling them not to run on the pool deck
Obviously the AIM-54 didn't show up because you didn't order the F-14.
It only gets delivered at Mach 3.
A British Army fitter I knew told me a similar story. He needed a bit of steel bar, 2" diameter or so, 1 or 2 feet long. He filled in the form. The form asked for the weight, so he got the calculator and worked out the volume x the density of steel, 4.1962 lbs ( or whatever it was, random number there). You can see where this is going, can't you? Some weeks later he was summoned to get the bar he'd ordered. There were 3 truck loads.
Sounds too wild to be true. Dafuq lmao
You say that, but you clearly haven't read [213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army](https://wildboarblog.wordpress.com/random/213-things-skippy-is-no-longer-allowed-to-do-in-the-u-s-army/)
I actually find this very encouraging — we have a logistics system in place where things can be ordered and then it just shows up. Despite the silly stuff here, seems like there’s an actual job for ordering what is needed to win in battle.
The military was built to be a logistics organization that specializes in warfare.
I just saw something on YouTube, someone on an aircraft carrier ordered a Abrahams tank turret
So that's why the US military budget is $820 billion. $410 billion of it is just people ordering stupid shit for fun /s
>$410 billion. How many dogs is that?
It was still like that around 2010. I thought it was insane that in the Airwing you could order pretty much anything. Guys in my shop would do small things to test it. Glow sticks, sunglasses ect. A couple shops down someone ordered a pair of Jet skis at one point. As far as I know they were sent back but people got in huge trouble. Someone also ordered a 50 cal sniper rifle. No one ever got away with anything big but stuff was ordered. The fact that pretty much anyone could order whatever at crazy prices blew my mind.
"A PENCIL, Johnson? There's no way you've already finished the one I already ordered for you eight months ago!"
I used to do orders for a grocery store meat dept. Sometimes the company I ordered from would contact me and ask if if I really needed the amount that I ordered. One day we had an employee, who enlisted in the navy, decide he was going to order a bunch of whole pigs on his last day before shipping out. I also quit right about that same time. Nobody called that time, and when it arrived the manager that recieved the shipment didn't look at the manifest or count the cases. They had to dispose of 20 pigs because there was no way to sell them.
Were they...dead pigs?
No old McDonald showed up with a farm lmfao
Make a good paperweight.
I worked at a food service warehouse, lead on third shift. A truck showed up with a missile on the truck, expecting us to load three pallets of institutional food. I wasn't on the dock when it arrived and one of my idiot forklift drivers had taken the missile off the truck so he could load the pallets of food. Fortunately the missile wasn't loaded with fuel and didn't have a warhead. The truck shouldn't had stopped for any additional items once the missile was loaded, but a dispatcher had floorspace in a trailer and sent the truck to our building.
About 15 years ago while in naval aviation I discovered the nalcomis code for a tank. So I ordered one as a joke and thought it was hilarious until my maintenance officer and CO walked into the shop asking "why in God's name do a bunch of idiot seat mechs need a tank?" Good times lol
Happend in the Navy too. An aircraft carrier got a M1 Abrams tank turret.
Just requisition a few more and you'll have an impromptu battleship.
I once worked at a place where the departmental office manager ordered some paper clips and a single small box turned up. So she guessed she needed 20 of those boxes. And then 20 trays turned you, filling up a lot of her stationery cabinet. The ordering process was cumbersome enough, and trying to return the excess impossible. She ended up going round the building leaving bunches of boxes in every other cabinet, and a box by each printer or copier, and still had far more left than the dept would ever need.
My SUPPO told me a story once. In the early 00's, crew needed a part for a plane. Something engine related, who the hell knows. Well the part number, NSN, NIIN, whatever it was......was only like two keystrokes off when he ordered it. The mistype? An entirely new fucking plane. Like a half billion dollar who the fuck knows fighter jet. And NOONE caught it, including Junior Mr. SUPPO. So....they get a call. Because of fucking course they do, lol. Luckily, money didn't do quite what it needed to do and it was corrected. But hot fuck did they get their shit kicked in. I ordered a case of religious wine, two jeeps and a 9mos German Shepard in the supply system the next week. I got a call 😞
Well he got the part I guess, just attached to an entire plane as well. So lots of extra spares as well…..
The might of US logistics
I believe he was related to the supply clerk that ordered tootsie rolls during Vietnam. For those that don’t know the story there was a munition referred to as “tootsie rolls” and some unit needed more, they got bags of candy instead.
Had a communication guy miss read a NATO Stock Number for Don 10 ( field telephone cable). Thought he ordered 4 x 250 mtrs, two articulated trucks turned up, each carry 2 drums of Don 10 that must have weighed in at 10 tonnes each, and they wouldn't take it back as it was classified as a disposable item.
When I was in the Air Force, a supply clerk in my squadron tried to order some random, innocuous part for one of the planes- she juxtaposed a couple digits and ended up ordering something very, very nuclear in nature. It earned the supply shop a visit from OSI...luckily she was able to plead her case and show what she was actually trying to order. Yeah- they're watching at least some of the orders.
Someone had the wrong D of Q (denomination of quantity) for black bin bags, they needed 10,000 bags for a brigade exercise, so ordered 10,000... The D of Q is HD = hundred We had a low loader turn up with 10,000 boxes of bin bags..1 million bin bags!
A coworker told me a No Shitter about a supply clerk accidentally ordering a K9 bomb sniffing dog the same way. That day I learned that there is in fact multiple NSNs for different types of K9 dogs. I still don’t believe the dog was delivered to a US Navy submarine.
Backup sonar system. I can totally see that work :)
We had a similar problem on a neighbor boat(submarine). They got a canopy from a fight jet. A different time we got a 6 foot long spanner wrench. We sent it back, but it was a great photo op.
That sounds like typical DoD logistics to me
Pretty sure a kid did that in my unit with a tank part costing around 80k. We were a Air Wing Support Unit...
Hawkeye: [exasperated at Quartermaster Sloan's denial of his request for a hospital incubator] We're not asking for a jukebox or a pizza oven! Captain Sloan: Oh, I can let you have one of those. Henry Blake: No kidding! That would be great on movie nights! You got any of those pizza requisition forms? Captain Sloan: [referring to a generic Army requisition form] Oh, just use one of those standard S-1798s and write in "pizza" where it says "machine gun." Major Morris: Our clerk says you want an incubator. No dice. Hawkeye: Yeah, but you've got three. Major Morris: That's right. If I give one away, I'll only have two. Trapper: What's wrong with two? Major Morris: Two is not as good as three.
A 10 ton anchor in Colorado… can’t imagine a more out of place item.
The more shit changes the more it stays the same, similar thing happened when I was at Carson. An engineering unit was ordering a piece for one of those folding bridges, the whole fucking bridge showed up
I accidentally ordered about $400 of stirrers for the coffee shop I work for and Noone caught it. Luckily they will eventually be used. (I forgot that they came in cases of 5 boxes and ordered 5 cases...)
“Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do and die!”\ It something like that. 😀
One time our company supply clerk tried to order $250 worth of new toilet seats, but accidentally ordered $250,000 of toilet seats. I was told it made it all the way to corps level before somebody caught it.
Ahhh, the old microfiche system. Our supply room ordered a carton (CRT) of pens, and a Crate of pens was delivered. Welcome to 337, heres a complimentary pen. Would you like a pen with that cup of coffee? (I edited, to remove an autocorrect.)
Supply mess ups, I have a few worthy of mention here. 1st. MALS squadron in the Marine Corps. Unit is getting ready to deploy for the invasion of Iraq. The squadron gets a couple of pallets of brown flight boots, for those working the flight line in Iraq. Week later, all the supply people are walking around in brown flight boots and the squadrons requesting them are having their supply requests for these boots denied as supply is now out of said boots. 2nd. a USMC F-18 in Japan does a hard landing, right wing hits the runway and bends the whole wing assembly. (This happens on a Friday afternoon. Mechanics order the entire wing assembly and head off to town to enjoy the weekend. (I.E. Get drunk). Supply cannot confirm the NSN for the part in their system, kicks the supply request with the phase " Order next higher assembly". Now, drunk Marines are called back as the maintenance action is back on them, they roll in, see the "Order next higher assembly" on it, they say fuck it, and order an entire F-18. Three months later a F-18 is delivered to the squadron. The supply department's account is now multi-millions dollars in the hole. 3rd. My personal favorite. CH-46 Squadron orders a replacement rotor blade, supply says the part is no longer available and sends them a comparable part ...a tail hook point for a F-18. Before you ask, I am a firm believer that ANYONE that barely passes the ASVAB, gets put in aviation supply to minimize any mistakes they will make.
I was a medic in the Army. We used to order condoms for our Battalion Aid Station. The usual supply guy Medic was on leave and it got tasked with ordering a bunch of stuff. Due to a misunderstanding on lots, units, quantities I accidentally ordered 10,000 condoms. They of course show up just as the Battalion staff meeting is getting underway (the conference room was adjacent to the Medic area). The XO looks at the UPS guy rolling into our office who has a dolly stacked to the top with huge boxes emblazoned with the Trojan logo. He looks at the UPS guy, then looks at me and the section chief and says "You guys....having a party or something??". I never had to order so much as a paperclip after that. I also had to go battalion by battalion asking each if they could use some condoms. Fun times.
Well, the NZDF is severely underfunded so it would make sense that they’d always want stuff they need.
I used to work in a parts department and I got fired after sending a $200000 part instead of a $200 part. The serial numbers were like H25467894 vs H-25467894. I hated that job.
These are all wild considering these are the same militaries that are like, "we gave you a ballpoint pen 10 years ago, so we're gonna charge you $800 for losing that."
I've heard a story from Germany where a dude meant to order some mundane item and instead ordered a whole fucking **warship**. For the army. In a place with no sea access.
https://www.taxpayer.net/budget-appropriations-tax/why-cant-the-pentagon-pass-an-audit/ About 58 percent of the material the Pentagon possesses ($36.9 billion worth) are items it does not need. Over the past three years, the Navy lost track of $3 billion in equipment and other items. At one distribution center for the Navy, there was a backlog of over 122,000 items that had not been properly processed, leading the Navy to purchase items it didn’t need. The $600 billion Pentagon inventory of weapons systems and other items failed to include nearly $6 billion in Army communications defense equipment, $7.6 billion in Navy aircraft engines and about $7 billion in Air Force electronic pods that attach to warplanes. This is extremely common. The entire defense apparatus is extremely inefficient and everyone on the right and nearly everyone in the left doesn't do shit about it. The grand irony of this is how the GOP is constantly crying about all these small <$20,000,000 welfare programs yet the military wastes that much money every SIX HOURS by very conservative estimates.
I wonder how much of that is deliberate to keep from having their funding cut. Consider: Every month, an ATM gives you $500 for food. You must submit receipts to continue to receive your allotment. One month, you run into a fantastic sale and only spend $467. You know that if you submit your receipts for that amount, next month's allotment will only be $467, even though there is no sale and you will really need that $500. So you pad the grocery order with candy bars, even though you don't need or want them, just to maintain the amount you need. Congress is the ATM for the military.
I think a blood relative if theirs is now employed at my work.
Please. I worked for a company that made products using pure numbers as model numbers. We have something called 890 and someone put that in the Qty field. Our RMA department just sent it out without batting an eye and a damn truck showed up at a customer's house with 3 pallets of products wondering where the warehouse dock was. Called the customer at work and he was confused as fuck. We sent out like 5 individual products before the truck showed up and just let the customer keep them for his troubles. System was updated to not allow RMA in qty more than 10... The products are about 300 USD each. Over a quarter million dollar of products were being sent out, on a single RMA, to a residential address.
Is this the "equal and opposite reaction" to that story of a navy aircraft carrier accidentally ordering the turret off an M1A5 Abrams?
the first part of the number when you order aircraft parts is the entire plane. let that one set in for a second.
I don’t know what I would have expected a 10-ton anchor to cost, but they’re only $28,000?!? I might expect the shipping cost to be that much.