Navy Stories 13 Mess Cranking

December 4th, 2009 by Ben Moreno

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For those of you who know what “mess cranking” is, then you pretty much know what I am about to talk about.  You are basically a slave/restaurant worker.

Mess cranking is a slang term for Food Service Attendant or FSA.  As an FSA you are required to work in the mess area and do a number of laborous tasks such as, scrubbing pots and pans, serving food, detailed cleaning, stocking large quantities of food and more.

Every division is required to provide 1 or 2 people to work in the mess hall for up to 3 months.  I was one of the unlucky people in my division who were chosen.

I started off working in the kitchen scrubbing hot ass pots and pans.  There were 3 big sinks and after every meal I had to scrub all of the pots and pans that were used.  In the first sink I scrubbed the pans with soap.  In the second sink I rinsed them.  Finally, in the third sink, I sterilized them in super hot water using heavy rubber gloves.

After doing this for about a month they moved me into the scullery where I was in charge of washing all of the food trays, bowls and eating utensils.  The scullery was a small room with a big dish washing machine and garbage disposal in it.  There was a window where people passed me the trays after they were done eating.

I had to grind up all remaining food and then run sets of dishes through the dish washer.  The dishes stand up right in the machine and then run through several phases, from soapy hot water to boiling, sterilizing water.  It even had a special section that supposedly waxed the silver ware.

After all the dishes were washed and put away for the next meal we had to completely clean the crap out of everything.  I remember getting very little free time during those three months because of the massive amount of work required to run that place.  It was no wonder they shifted the responsibility around between divisions because I know of no one who would want to do that as a regular job.

In that type of working environment you were constantly sweating.  I pretty much was wet with full body sweat for about 3 months.  I lost 10-15 pounds and built up some pretty solid strength from humping all those heavy ass boxes of meat, to and from the freezer.

Every so often we would have to get new supplies of food and when we did it required a lot of people. We would create fire lines from the pier all the way to the freezer and pass all of the food all the way down to the freezer.  By the way, a fire line is when people stand in line from one place to another and pass objects between each other to get them to the other side.  So it basically was a smart way of moving large quantities of food from the pier down 3 decks to the food storage area.

Working as an FSA was more than a full time job and we would work from 6am to around 8pm+, 7 days a week.  I don’t remember having a day off in 3 months but I might have.  I can’t remember if we had days off but we must have.  3 months straight without a day off?  Hmm, maybe we did lol.

Anyway, it got worse.  I was also unlucky enough to be working as an FSA during a global mess inspection phase.  I can’t remember the acronyms and terms they used to call it but there were some high ranking people and health inspectors who came in and inspected the mess area.

Let me tell you, this sucked!  This inspection was no joke we had to clean so incredibility much that it almost broke us.  We had to clean all day and night and then some.  We had to clean things that you would never even think of.  It was ridiculous!  I remember getting so stressed out and frustrated that I almost quit.  I had to paint the entire scullery and shine all metal.

We were required to score at least 95% on the inspection.  They would go out of their way to try and hit you on something.  I remember they would open drawers and rub their finger underneath it to look for dust.  They were relentless, checking everything they could think of to try to find anything to lower our score.

I think we ended up scoring a 97% overall so we passed

If you look at it from the big picture though…maybe through the eyes of the crew, you can see how important it is to keep the quality of food service really high.  There were over 300 people that had to live together on the ship so hygiene and cleanliness were essential to keep the health of the crew members up.

The last thing you would want is half the crew sick because we were not doing out job.  Personally I viewed most of the crew as my family and would never want anything bad to happen to them.

In conclusion, working in the Navy was all about pride.  You were required to own your responsibilities and not be a wuss.  You needed to handle your business.  Although, I think differently today I understand why it was important in that environment.  We were charged with protecting the country.  In order to do that you needed to be willing and able to do things other people were not willing to do.  It was a team effort on a large scale and it worked.

Sure there were many times it sucked but that is just the nature of that environment.  I learned a valuable lesson in life.  When you take personal pride in your responsibilities, people notice and they will trust you and respect you.  That is a wonderful feeling.

Sure people will joke and be mean to you but it is all out of love, because you will find that when the shit hits the fan they got your back.

In the next story I will share with you a situation that went from bad to worse and could of ended up extremely horrible.

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Tags: eating in the military, food service attendant, FSA, mess cranking, mess decks, mess hall, military food, navy eating, navy food, sailor food, scullery

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Navy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.