Friday, April 24, 2020

Vampire Liberty

The Navy kind of, sort of, encouraged sailors to donate blood. The way that they did that was to give people time off for donating blood. At first, at least at my command, a donor got both the day of donation and the following day off. The unofficial term for the time off was "vampire liberty".

That created all sorts of problems, especially if the donor's duty day was the following day. At first, they ran a sign-up sheet where, supposedly, duty section leaders and the division officers and chiefs could check to keep slackers from abusing it.

But that didn't work out so well. The thought was raised to run it by using special request chits, which would go up the chain of command to the Senior Watch Officer, if approved, and the XO, if denied. But even that seemed to be a pain in the ass.

So what was decided was that donors would only get the rest of the day of donation off. Since sailors who were in the duty section were forbidden from leaving the command without permission in the first place, sailors who had duty couldn't donate. Those who wouldn't donate without getting the free time were slackers and goof-offs, anyway. The chiefs knew who they were.

No comments: