The final outcome of the blogging "scandal"

UPDATE: You've been had. Yes, as they say on MTV, you've been punk'd. You'd be surprised how many people believed the story in strikeout below. I did try to give a few hints (the title linked to Wikipedia's entry on April Fool's Day, the Technorati tag said"Blogging" but linked to "April Fools"...), but I've gotten a lot of emails and comments believing I really going to the skimmer world with one less stripe.

I know...mean one. But the setup was too good to pass by, and you know us submariners and our sense of humor.

Reality...I had duty on Friday, no mast, did a bunch of stuff in the engineering spaces in the restoration phase of the recent big evolution we performed, but all in all Friday was an uneventful day. After midnight, though, the jokers started sprouting up out of the bliges...

Well, the results are finally in...I found out yesterday what the final answer for the whole blogging "controversy" was to be.

End result...I'm going to be heading to the surface fleet to join the folks who first brought this whole episode up (they were Surface Warfare Officers). Oh, I'm going as a non-nuclear ET, and now a second-class petty officer as well.

Yes...I not only got sent to Captain's Mast, I got reduced in rank to E5 and had my nuclear NEC removed. I'll also be paying back quite a hefty chunk of the reenlistment bonus I recieved when I reenlisted a couple of years ago.

This is the last you'll hear of me on the blog...given the significant drop in income and the fact that I'm paying back a very, very large chunk of money I'm selling both of my computers and dropping my cable/Interent service...I can no longer afford it. I won't be in Hawaii much longer, either, as I'm getting stationed on a ship based out of Japan. My family is going to move back to the mainland U.S..

I'll be getting out in about a year and a half (August 2007), and despite having 16 1/2 years in the Navy I'm calling it quits at that point. Starting out again as an E5 at the 15 year mark just isn't what I had in mind for a "career".

I'll leave the blog up if anyone wants to poke back through past posts, or see what prompted this post.

Goodbye, Internet.

Tags: April Fools