I just wanted to say hi to everyone going to Akademy. I once again cannot go this year but I figured to compensate I’d regale you with a story from my Officer Candidate School days.
This is a War Spoon
This is a plate of spaghetti
When I first got to OCS, my eating habits were, uh, modified (to say the least) by the Officer Candidate Regulations manual. Instead of being able to eat food with a knife and a fork, I, as a newly minted worse-than-dirt OC got a spoon to eat with. The spoon was used to eat everything.
It was not sufficient that the spoon was the only utensil you had either. As an Officer-in-training you were not allowed to do anything as barbaric as pick up your food with your fingers. In fact you had a regimented, easy-to-follow 8-step procedure for eating. They called it eating-by-numbers.
So how does spaghetti tie in? Well, at every trip to the chow hall, spaghetti was an option on the menu (except for breakfast). Didn’t like mystery meat with noodles jefferson? Just get spaghetti. Get it every meal if you want. I wasn’t sure why the mess cooks liked spaghetti so much, but I wasn’t complaining. I love spaghetti. I even loved spaghetti by the end of OCS, wasn’t tired of it one bit.
But… how do you eat spaghetti with a war spoon? Well, the secret is that you cannot twirl your spaghetti into a bundle on your spoon and eat it as if you were using a fork. If you were to try to you’d make a mess everywhere (and thereby risk drawing attention to yourself). Even worse, it would be hard to actually eat all of the spaghetti without having to slurp any into your mouth. This definitely draws attention from the roving Class Drill Instructors. Officer Candidates do not like attention from Class Drill Instructors.
Instead learn to use what you have. With a war spoon, you simply have to use the edge of the spoon to cut the spaghetti into bite-sized pieces. Basically you use it like you’d cut a piece of pie out of a pan. It takes less time than you think once you get good at it. After a couple of days of practice you’ll be able to actually eat more spaghetti than you were able to before in a given amount of time.
At about week 4 or so we had our forks given back to us. How did I eat my spaghetti? With a war spoon, of course. Time is still precious, and you can fit more spaghetti onto a war spoon than onto a fork even if you use the pie-cutter technique.
To this day I still eat my spaghetti by the pie-cutter method instead of twirling. I use a fork now though, no reason not to be civilized. ;)