A Sea Story from the 90s

SUBPAR received the following from an anonymous writer. We are thrilled to share his prank with all of you.

BT

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First, some context:

In 1992, when our story takes place, we didn’t have very many entertainment sources. This was pre-internet, pre-widespread use of gaming consoles (no flat screens). We burned the occasional movie in the wardroom, played a lot of spades and cribbage, and read the occasional familygram.

In this stimulus-deficient environment, the primary source of entertainment for the JOs was irritating other JOs. It was a game, with simple rules: if you could get a visible reaction from someone – anger, disgust, anything really – then you won.

One day, after a light morning of drills, we had a full table in the wardroom for lunch. It was a normal lunch, until dessert, which was chocolate cake. The chocolate cake was the normal boat chocolate cake, but instead of having the white frosting which it had had the last 582 times it had been served, today the frosting was a really intense smurf blue color. Probably one of the cooks had a hair up his ass on the midwatch when they cooked it, and decided to get a little creative. Who knows?

So the wardroom mess attendant brings in and serves the ten of us our cake with electric blue frosting, and we are all just gobsmacked. There was a good 10-15 seconds of stunned silence as we all tried to process what we were seeing. Chocolate cake with blue frosting was so far outside our lived experience to that point it was hard to comprehend. I snapped out of it first, and had an idea…I leaned forward, and sort of theatrically waved my hand around over the cake to waft the scent up to my nose, and said, “MMMM – it smells like blueberries.”

Of course, this was bullshit – it smelled just like normal frosting which means it didn’t really smell at all, and “smells like blueberries” was a ridiculous claim – the color was all wrong. If it was going to smell like anything, it would be toxic waste or something. Or blue raspberry Slurpees. Do blueberries even have a distinctive smell? Anyway, eight of the officers at the table could immediately see where I was going with this, and started paying attention. Nobody could be this dumb, right? [REDACTED] is setting up the oldest trick in the book. Nobody is going to fall for this, right?

But the guy sitting to my right – I’ll call him John, because his name was John – said, “Really?”

Ok, now the other eight guys are REALLY paying attention. They have seen this cartoon a million times. They know what comes next. But John can’t possibly fall for this, right?

I then said, “Yes, it really smells like blueberries. Want a sniff?” And John says, “Uh-huh,” so I lift up my cake plate under his nose, and when John leans forward to sniff it, I sort of boop it into his face…but in an officer and a gentleman kind of way – this wasn’t like a trashy bride/groom wedding cake smashing video – John just ended up with a nickel-sized blob of frosting on the end of his nose.

John sat there quietly for a bit, and you could see his whole thought process playing out in real time: “Wait, that frosting didn’t smell like blueberries…[REDACTED] tricked me! Wait, did I just fall for the literally oldest trick in the book like a four-year old…Wait, did I just do that in front of nine other people?...Wait, maybe they weren’t paying attention and didn’t notice…FUCK! They are all staring at me with frosting on my nose like an idiot!” At that point John loses his mind, launches himself out of his chair, and starts chasing me around the wardroom table. Then the captain is yelling at him to control himself, and pandemonium ensues.

Nobody ever won that game harder than I did.

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