The touching letter I recently received from a grateful father has made waves. It made it's way to my boss and her bosses, the Director of the hospital and the deputy directors.
Being relatively new in this hospital, this is good for my reputation, to say the least.
In other news:
I just returned from reserve duty. The medical unit that I command had a training excercise. This is a small very close knit unit. We usually organize a festive meal at the end of the excercise. This is of course against army regulations because only army cooks are allowed to cook and feed the army. (Actually, much of the cooking has been outsourced to caterers. Don't get too excited, it's still army food!).
One of the officers on the base made a point of reciting the regulation, but, if we cook off base then he can't do anything. We were under the impression that we were off of the base because we were, in fact, outside the perimeter fence. But it turns out that there was a second fence. We of course completely ignored the regulation. One of my soldiers is an excellent cook, and he was cooking up a storm in a huge cast iron pot. He made us some "plov":
(click to bigify)
Nothing will come between the medical corps and its plov!
Close to midnight, as we were about to dig into the enormous portions, the officer again contacted us, this time to order us to disperse because we couldn't be off base with the vehicles after midnight.
Wait a minute, when we were cooking, we were on the base. When we were eating we were off the base. The thing is, we hadn't moved in 4 hours.
This reminds me of the famous maxim: "There's the right way, there's the wrong way, and there's the army way.
2 comments:
Hi Sandman -That's funny...and true!
I love to write thank you letters for people and have written some really nice ones for my docs... and I bring them food.
And then I have fallen short writing them for hospital staff when I had the best of intentions.
Never heard of Plov, but sounds good. It will give me something different to do with lamb. :)
That's an idiotic rule. If you want to have a cookout, then who cares? The important thing is that everything is sanitary, which shouldn't be a problem for a medical unit.
On one of the submarines I was on, we had a nice flat missile deck to use as a 'black beach.' Perfect for a cookout during a swim call in the Bahamas. Just drag the grill up through the hatch and get to it while everyone swam off the bow. And the cooks didn't cook, one of the senior enlisted ran the grill. The cooks were in the water with everyone else. Good fun.
http://www.ssbn657.com/images/jeff27.jpg
Post a Comment