Rumor Mill

I spent my life in the military and I'm now just hearing that there were rumors in the Army? Why wasn't I notified?.....lol!

The output of the rumor mill is directly proportional to the depth of your unit on the org chart - the closer to the top, the greater the output.

OMG the sh!t you get from a state headquarters - who's secretly dating who, who's screwing who, who screwed over who, who got promoted over who...

It's like a f--king tree full of owls up there.

If you think rumor mills abound the higher up in the food chain you go...try living on a ship...even better a submarine. The rumor mill on ships generally cranks at no less than 400k rpm on a slow day. I remember starting all sorts of rumors just to see what they'd morph into by the time it got back to me. The general turnaround time on a ship of 500....about 32 minutes for one with juicy/gory/sex details and about 1.2 minutes for operational details. One time we were ordered to make an extended solo high speed run but without any pre-planned fuel stops - something that simply was against every rule in the book (no ship permitted to get below 90% fuel without refueling). I started a betting pool immediately! Hour after hour we continued on this amazing high speed run - Adm "31 knot" Burke would have been proud! One day turns into two...we're still on the high speed run and no orders for an underweigh replenishmen (unrep). Captain calls me up to the bridge with the Cheng 4 feet in front of me.
"Can we use the JP-4 in the engines?" the CO queries the Cheng. "Yes". "Can we sustain the crew / water in contaminated water?" Cheng hesitates, looks at me. Both of us want to ask about the 400 ton white elephant in the room but obviously the CO is under orders to not reveal our destination. I give the Cheng the "hell if I know look" and the Cheng says: "we'll top off all tanks and see what the water reads when we get there". We're dismissed.

By the time the betting pool was closed there was over 400 different locations to where we were headed.

Then all of a sudden, the ship slowed and made a wide turn......and started making a very sedate path to a tanker that we met up with the next day early. We spent the entire next day refueling. Never did find out where we were supposed to be going......

Man I hated handing back all those matches...........