so today me and another Sergeant were going to do a funeral for a SSG who died. He was a vet. We rehearsed and tested our trumpet. OK cool, its snuff. we goto the funeral at 11:15 am....all they had prepared was a hole with some dirt next to it, next to the hole was a black vault all chipped, lid laying next to it, with rachet straps layin inside of it with a piece of wood on top of the vault(looked horrible). so we drove down after an hour of no one showing cuz we thought we had maybe the wrong hole or something. nope 12:30 hearse pulls up so we goto attention salute the flag drapped coffin. ok cool, so the pastor goes to the foot of the coffin, reads, then its our show. i'm taking my bugle out and the mic unexpectantly falls out(no one saw). so i start playing, midway thru taps, the f***in thing dies(just the day before we had played it twice and the batteries were fine). man so i just go with the show like its over, march tot he foot of the coffin, other NCO at the other end. so we start folding the flag(we had to walk over other headstones and dirt mounds to find a clearing(talk about set up for failure)...man i folded it the tightest i could, get to the end, the flag can't fold in on its self. so i told the other NCO i'm gonna refold it(embarrassing as hell for the service)...hes NCOIC and he says no just roll with it. so it came undone when she put it down. man talk about wishing you could be dead. here he tells me, when they went with this funeral director last time, their flag couldn't be folded. here, they buy cheap flags(which MFG cuts short to save on cash) so we totally blew the ceremony. the last military contact that family has and we dropped the ball hard. talk about the *** chewing the major's gonna give me on monday morning.

 

As someone who has helped do about 300+ funerals, and plan over 2,500 more a year for Arlington National Cemetary I know how madly things can cascade out of proportion. I have seen and participated in some great ceremonies and some ones that were truly maddening. One in particular stands out, and you have to remember that we are the premier unit in the entire world for performing ceremonies and funerals. On a cold September day we had a funeral for a Brigader General which our Commanding General attended as they were friends. The march down from the chapel went fine, but for some odd reason as soon as we came to attention and present arms beside the gravesite the 21 gun salute from the guns platoon started going. As military honors go its supposed to be done after the body has been given honors by the chaplin and the flag is folded. Well the OIC reacted well and had everyone stay at present arms, and proceded to continue as normal. The 7 man firing party did their 21 gun salute, and then for some odd reason the guns platoon officer called back and did yet another 21 gun salute. Bad idea. I remember looking at the CG's face as it happened, first disbelief, then shock, and then anger behind his eyes. I dont remember seeing that guns platoon officer ever again.

I have another story about an air force girl passing out in front of the president at the tomb of the unknown soldiers too.

 

One time I let an air biscuit slip in front of the regional vice president when she came to visit my store. I just couldn't hold it any more. Sucks even more because she's hot, single, and makes about $300k a year.

 

When I worked at Blockbuster (a long time ago), I was busted big time. I was 16 and immature. We had ceiling fans, and we turned them on full speed. We took those yellow plastic stick locks they use to lock the cases and were throwing them in the ceiling fans. They would ricochet and come flying at us or smash into walls and such. Oh, it was great fun.

Anyway, the district manager as well as my store manager walked in the door the second I tossed a handful of these things into the ceiling fan right by the door. They shot off it all directions, and wouldn't you know it, hit the district manager square in the forehead (leaving a nice, red square on his head for the rest of the day.) And my store manager was hit in the arm (also leaving a nice little red mark.)

Oh, how I should have been fired that day. (and was reamed left and right from both of them). I find it funny that 2 months later, I was promoted to store manager. Lucky I guess.

 

2nd day on the job as the lead of the Sr. Systems Engineers for the largest of the credit bureaus. I walk into the NOC (network operations center) and everyone is in a panic. So far there have been over 7000 database timeouts and the various websites are pretty much offline.

I start troubleshooting the problem as the room fills up with executives that I haven't even met yet. Screw them, I do my job no matter who looks over my shoulder, I own these systems in my position. (each hour of down time costs the company >$150,000.00). The problem became apparent within minutes, all 8 processors in the active SQL cluster node are pegged and the server is out of memory (8 gig used). I/O to the SAN is fine at around 1000 IOps.

Looking at the activity and logs in SQL nothing appears out of the ordinary and traffic isn't higher than it should be, we get 60 or 70 thousand orders a day. Why the hell is the server running so hot? These are 4 node Geo Clusters and should be fine with this. Suddenly I hear someone behind me ask,

"Are we on the slow node?"

So I asked what they mean by "slow node". One of them says that they only bought one new server with enough power to handle all the transactions and the others were last years 8 CPU boxes. The cluster had failed over to one of the other nodes and it couldn't handle the traffic. I turned around and said boldly,

"Who the hell designs an enterprise cluster solution with a slow node? That's idiotic."

Another voice from behind me says "I did". It was the Senior Vice President in charge of technology for xxxxxxx credit bureau worldwide.

Any noob engineer knows that in a SQL cluster all nodes need to be equal, and should be able to handle any of the active resources at any time. All nodes are equal now and that VP still hates me. He was moved to a different spot, I was promoted.

What could have been my worst moment was actually his I guess. If I had been some kind of weenie that didn't stand up for himself it would have been my worst. Moral of the story is, be bold and stand up for what you know is right, just be sure you actually know it.

 

lol man its funny how all of this would make great youtube material. when u busted *** was there anyone around to blame lol