Lost his cap and pants

I would have thought the officer could have escorted Andy back to his car and then gone back for his cap. Unless walking around without a cap would have been a worse reprimand….

At least he wasn't caught with his pants down.

I take my hat off to both :)

I shall only tip mine!

Aren't exactly famed for having basic common sense.

That's why Sergeants exist ;-)

You mean like sergeant Detritus?

I'll get me coat (the one with Feet of Clay in the pocket)

I seem to recall Detritus being particularly effective!

Detritus was more effective when he was wearing his *special* cap.

Maybe the officer's brain was overheating which was why he made bad decisions.

Private Browsing says... Hold my beer - SAH!

Drinking on duty! That'll be sorted by Corporal Punishment!

As per open order s from General Purpose.

(Sorry, not such a good one - was working through the ranks, got stuck on Lieutenant Pigeon and now all I can think is plunka-plunka-plunka "Mouldy old dough")

I want to know who General Error is? And why is he reading my hard drive?

Good NCOs are the glue that holds any military together. ANY officer, newly hatched or vastly experienced, who doesn't immediately think twice on hearing a respectful "Are you sure about that, Sir?" from their senior NCO is overconfident. Even if they decide to go ahead anyway, they at least need to look again for anything they might have missed.

Question: What is the most dangerous thing in the British army?

Answer: An officer with a map.

(Joke icon, but, 'many a true word spoken in jest'.)

But everyone's an "officer" these days in the popular media, just as everyone's an "engineer".

OK. I remember the time when I was the lead technician for a particularly secret military.... lost carrier

This was a trip to a banks HQ - we were meant to be escorted at all times.

Our last day (after a couple of week visit) we could see the exterior badge locked door (for staff) was green - so we went in. We only had paper badges saying visitor.

We went to the secure inner sanctum, and the door was open because the cleaner needed the plug outside the room - to be able to clean inside the room.

We sat down and waited. Our contact came in and asked - "how did you get in here?" so we told him.

It turned out there had been a power blip somewhere - and the doors failed safe to unlocked.

They installed a "plug for cleaners" inside the inner sanctum.

A colleague in the US went to a secure underground nuclear bunker site for a briefing. He was accompanied everywhere at all times by an armed marine. When I say everywhere, the toilet cubicles did not have doors on them!

He said the whole experience was very scary.

I was once briefed by a man on security, who did not exist..... he said he worked for our company, but was not in the internal phone directory.

> a man ... who did not exist

As I was walking down the stair, I met a man who was not there. He was not there again today; oh, how I wish he'd go away.

"he said he worked for our company, but was not in the internal phone directory."

Although I worked in a different building I used to eat in the canteen of the tower block, half occupied by BT*, at the corner of Euston Rd & Hampstead Rd. There was rumoured to be an entire hidden floor floor that the lift bypassed.

* The company I worked for had BT and the other occupants of the building as clients. The price paid in the canteen depended on which client you were working for.

I was allowed to drop my toolkit, a new CRT, laser printer and my briefcase in the loading bay of a major global bank in London and then I drove out to find parking.

When I got back to the loading bay, the bomb squad was apparently on its way and a building evac was just about to be called because there had been a shift change of security guard and the one going off duty did not mention me in the handover.

Apparently the new guard caught sight of the toolkit, my Samsonite, silver-coloured briefcase and reached for the phone.

I once worked for a dual-use board manufacturer i.e. there were legitimate civilian and armed forces uses for the rugged boards.

Just after the turn of the century a military Land Rover, 2 Squadies and an Officer turned up at the security gate. (The security guard later confessed to this being a "brown trouser" moment, but the visitors were very polite.) The board they brought had a finger width round hole near the middle and they wanted the non-volatile memory downloading to a device they had brought with them and then the board destroying. The 2 Squadies carried rifles and the Officer a Pistol/Revolver (I only saw them from a distance) and only the company technical manager and whoever was working on the board at the time were allowed within the room (or 22 yards when it was a more open area - yes very precise, although the length suggest that someone just stated "the length of a cricket pitch!)

Anyway the non-volatile memory (after metalwork, conformal coat etc. were removed) was removed from the board and placed on one of our "Golden Sample" boards used for test equipment calibration. The download then occurred without issue. But then they insisted both the original board and our "Golden Sample" had to be destroyed, rather than the non-volatile memory just being removed and destroyed with the original board. This cost us tens of thousands of pounds on the lost board and its replacement, but was insisted on by someone 5 or 6 ranks higher, over the Officers phone while the Squadies had the rifles pointed at the company technical manager and the CEO.

(I only learned these scant detail later, but had I known about the pointed rifles, I might have tried to induce a firing in true BOFH style.)

"This cost us tens of thousands of pounds on the lost board and its replacement"

You didn't bill them for it?

At an interview at an access control manufacturer, the interviewer told me a story about some of their kit that was installed at a bunker that wasn't working.

They were talking about sending a helicopter to collect the engineer to fix it, but decided just to blow the doors off instead!

Did they have a good Michael Caine impersonator on site?

Using explosives to open a locked door, or waiting for a repairperson to come out and fix it: which do you think would have given them more fun?

Right. That's why they used the explosives.

Back in the mid 90s I was regularly visiting the Department of Trade and Industry in Victoria Street, London. Until 1997 I used to be able to book a parking space in the underground car park, but that was stopped when the new government decided they wanted the spaces for MPs instead. Entry to the car park involved advanced booking of both vehicle registration and occupants but entry was usually without issue. However I then had to exit the car park by the entry ramp and walk round to the front door to get a visitor pass.

Visitors were supposed to be escorted at all times and this was generally the case. I would arrive and ask for my contact, who would come and meet me at reception and escort me to where I need to be. They would then escort me from the building at the end of the day. However, on many occasions, I would go out of the building for lunch. On the way out, my contact with carefully escort me to the door where I would hand my pass in to the security officer and mention that I was just popping out for lunch and will be back in a while which meant they would keep my badge for me to use on my return.

Quite often on return to the building I would walk in and the security officer would hand hand me back my visitors pass with a "you know where you're going, don't you, sir?" and let me through the barrier. My contact was always annoyed when I appeared back in the office unaccompanied!

You sure your contact was annoyed at you coming back unaccompanied, or just the fact you came back?

I used to very occasionally visit the MoD main building in London. They had a rule that if you went there 3 or more times in a year you could not get a paper pass, but would get a photo pass and PIN for entry / exit. I hated it. You try remembering a 4 digit PIN you last used 6 months ago and are not allowed to write down. Plus I always got lost inside so had to politely ask directions from anyone I could find. Really glad when I could surrender that pass. And the vertical tube entry system was a bit on the claustrophobic side for me. On the plus side no one ever pointed an actual rifle or other firearm at me AFAIK ...

Once upon a time I had the joys of working in cleanroom manufacturing, as a client for an American startup with lots of money and people but very little sense.

Someone at the client got fired (again) and our new liason at the company was a bloke from effectively "Nowhereville, Midwest USA" who had never held a passport in his life never mind travelled outside the USA. I remember him grumbling after arrival in the UK that a pub near his hotel wouldn't let him pay in US dollars.

I recall being on the conference call when he first decided to travel over to our factory, and he asked "of course, I'll be bringing my concealed carry - can you make sure to reserve a gun locker for me at the site?"

He was somewhat surprised to discover that no, a Illinois-issued concealed carry permit wasn't likely to be accepted at the airport for international travel, and no, we didn't have gun lockers...!

Many years ago (and just realised it's 50 - and I suddenly feel old) I was visiting a military establishment where they developed tank armour. I was there to look at one of the manufacturing processes they used as it might also be of use to my employer (my job back then was developing new manufacturing techniques to produce the ever more demanding designs put out by the engineers).

The checks and signing in process at the site gatehouse was very thorough (although I jumped the visitor queue there as I already had the necessary security grade clearance). Every visitor had to wear a visitor pass and be accompanied at all times by an authorised member of staff. Armed guards at each gate, and at various points around the site. At lunchtime, my host said they needed to run some personal errands so I'd need to make my own way to the canteen and back. "Across the green (watch out for tanks), down the steps and through the green door." I pointed out that security rules clearly stated that all visitors had to be escorted. "Just put your visitor badge in your pocket," that replied. "Then nobody will know you're not staff." Sure enough, my visit to the canteen was totally unhindered by any security issues.

It wasn't uncommon, back then, for the default to assume you were legitimate unless you wore a visitor badge - the idea being that security checks meant you wouldn't be there unless authorised, and the visitor badge meant staff would be ready to offer directions, etc. The same idea worked on many industrial sites where visitors and new starts wore green hard hats so staff knew to keep an eye out for unfamiliarity and step in to help.

"met by a military officer in the car park who watched carefully as he unpacked his tools and ladder then accompanied him onto the site."

Wow, things were a bit lax back them. Nowadays, when I go into a "secure" site, I have to provide, in advance, a list of all items being taken in and that list will be checked and matched against reality on both arrival and departure and, in some case, moving from a "secure" area to a "very secure" area. Mostly, phones and cameras are forbidden, often *anything* with data storage capability may also be forbidden, which can make fault diagnosing difficult. Removing anything from site with data storage capability is usually forbidden. Bearing in mind that's not just a hard disk or computer these days as most of the components for anything electronic is likely to have some form of flash storage these days. Hell, even a stick of RAM has an EEPROM on it that might be used to exfiltrate some data.

I'm glad I rarely, if ever, visit sites like that any more. Getting patted down multiple times per day by stony-faced, steely-eyed people with guns is not fun. Even a pretty, young blonde lady patting you down is a lot less fun when the aforementioned "work face" is on :-/

Not exactly national security, but I was once brought down by a guard dog when working on an automatic weather monitoring station at an open cast coal mine.

Nobody had thought to tell security that we might still be working after 5pm.

Closest I could find to a dog with big teeth ---->

~1985. As Customer Engineer I had to deliver a computer and printer to Garden Island West Australia to HMAS something or other. Passed through security in my car, parked. A crewmember came to get the boxes, he carried one. I was not told stay where I was so I helpfully picked up the other box and followed him on board.

Not sure if I was supposed to do that. I might have seen a look of surprise when he turned around. We deposited boxes to the left of where we entered and I disembarked.