Sounds strange to say this, but for me, it wasn't an issue with "orders" so much as it was an issue with the de-facto way almost everyone in my unit ran their maintenance procedures; which is to say, they did most of their work with blatant disregard for TO's.Treeinthewoods said:
Having been trained for over a year with the daily reminder that violating TO's can lead to death and destruction, I refused to adopt their shortcut methods. They got pissed off at my insubordination and relegated me to cleaning details to get me out of the way. After all that, I reported it to the first sergeant, and a squadron-wide investigation was carried out. Lots of people got burned pretty hard, and just about everyone hated me for being a brown-nosing, whistle-blowing sellout.
A few cut corners in a bulb replacement job is one thing, but when your sergeant tells you that you only need to put on glove liners when servicing liquid oxygen rather than full PPE, you know that apathy about workplace safety and protocol has reached a whole new level of fubar.
So, yeah. Not really a problem with being ordered to do something controversial in my case, but rather, being strongly pressured by my whole shop to shrug off the letter of the law in favor of doing things more practically. Doesn't sound so bad, but you have to remember, when they were finally forced to read the TO every time they did a job, they discovered that most of the TOs for the jobs they were doing had been updated and changed 5 years ago. You wouldn't want your surgeon's knowledge of surgical procedures to be 5 years obsolete, so why the hell would you be okay with having the people who fix and maintain military aircraft be that careless?
