I was a young Engineer on a little ship based in San Diego a long time ago when a new Commanding Officer with the management and leadership skills we have come to expect from Kamala Harris reported aboard. Things were a little hectic as we had about 70 of the crew out of the country and not due back anytime soon. The new Man had an idea early on that we needed to update the instructions on the ship. The ship itself was about 30 years old at that point and nothing had really changed in the last 20 years or so. Nevertheless, the order of the Day was to draft a new ship's instruction for refueling the ship.
I broke out the existing 3 page (with diagrams) instruction and retyped it and added a few words about fuel and things like that and ran it by the ship's office, Executive Officer and then the Commanding Officer. We had a little chat later that day. The new draft instruction was not complete and it was nowhere near long enough or thorough enough to cover the complex undertaking of actually refueling the ship.
I explained as how we had actually refueled the ship several hundred times using the instruction and never had a problem but that was not good enough. Another lash at redrafting the instruction was required and so it was done. As you might suspect, the new CO had played football for the Naval Academy. As far as I can tell that was his sole claim to fame. The new draft was liked no more than the first draft or the original. More work was necessary!
I had a brainstorm while over visiting a friend of mine on his wonderful brand new Cruiser that had just arrived in its very first homeport. He commiserated about my problems but then he observed that all of his ship's wonderful and thoroughly detailed instructions existed in digital form on computer disks. I borrowed the fueling instruction for USS Lake Champlain (CG-57) and ran a find and replace on it and inserted USS PLUCK (MSO-464) as needed throughout the 67 page fueling instruction and then printed it out as it was.
I submitted it through the ship's office, XO and to the CO the next morning. Never heard another word about it. I mean they probably started to smell a rat when the saw the various diagrams showing dozens of fuel tanks and compared it with the meager four that we had aboard but maybe not.
Reading this brought back the memory of pointless insanity on too little sleep.
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