by Jerry Curtis

Created on: February 05, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Those of us who write a lot and have made a living at it know the meaning of writing under pressure. That usually involves writing to a deadline and most often for either a demanding editor or boss. In my case it was usually a boss, and the nature of the writing was the business or administrative variety.

My most pressure-packed moments were in the military environment when I was a Navy administrative officer afloat when things had to be done quickly before the ship left port. Those were the days before e-mail. When the ship left the pier, the only communication we had was dedicated to those who ran the ship, usually by radio or dispatches through dedicated satellite. Administrators had to wait in line, and usually at the rear.

In the days before the internet and networking where the best we could do was use dual floppy drive Radio Shack TRS-80 dinosaur computers to automate some of the crushing workload, I worked as an administrator on several Navy aircraft carriers. My final posting was USS Coral Sea from 1982 through 1984. My shipboard job was similar to that of "City Manager," but my "city" was a large afloat community of over 5,000 men. Also, this small "city" moved from one place to another and often.

As Administrative Officer I learned the true meaning of writing under pressure. In the busy world of aircraft carriers, things never go as planned. The normal work load was, in a word, overwhelming. Just keeping up with the mail and sending in operational and administrative reports to the Captain's boss filled up everyone else's time. Then there were those periodic eruptions of "good ideas" from the Captain, which took priority and inevitably threw a monkey wrench into an already teetering effort to stay ahead of the blizzard of paperwork and reports.

Typically that pressure would roll downhill to men when the Executive Officer (the Captain's second in command) would call me and say something like, "The Captain wants us to write up some award recommendations recognizing those guys on the fire fighting group that put out that fire in the engine room yesterday. Stop what you're doing, and get on it, now!" Never mind that those firefighters did not work for me and that I had no clue of the facts in the incident. Those firefighters worked for the engine room supervisor, who did not specialize in descriptive prose needed to document the special recognition. In fact, just ask your average engineer to write anything but a boiler feed water salinity report, and he

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