Work-ups

Every organization has certain skills that need to be maintained.  In some cases, these skills are the day-to-day workings of the job; just by showing up to work and doing your job, you keep your skills up-to-date.  Sometimes, an extra course is required, or a professional development activity where you learn the new changes that will affect your job.

Some skills, however, are not part of day-to-day business.  What do you do if there’s a fire?  An earthquake?  A missile hits your office?

Seem a bit far-fetched?  Maybe for most civilian jobs.  However, as I have mentioned previously, I am a member of the Canadian Navy.  There is a chance that a missile will, at some point, be aimed at my workplace.  It probably won’t be any time soon, but who can say what the political climate will bring ten or twenty years from now?

Even with the many emergencies that can hit a warship at sea, it doesn’t make sense to practice for everything all the time.  The crew would get worn down, and regular work wouldn’t happen.  Instead, we practice the major ones (generally fire and flood) on a regular basis.  Generally, soon after we leave harbour we perform a Man Overboard exercise, which doubles as a manning check; part of the drill for Man Overboard is to verify that everybody is onboard.  However, even with these exercises, it is generally the ship’s staff running the drill, so our bosses know what to expect and when to expect it.

Enter work-ups.  This is a series of exercises, during a set period of time, in which we drill hard.  A group of instructors from the Sea Training Division come onboard.  Along with them, they bring smoke machines, thunder-flashes, and other devices to simulate emergency situations.  Experts in the equipment know how to “break” systems without causing real damage, allowing us to work around simulated combat damage.

For two weeks, we will be at “war”.  Any time, we can wake up to the sound of the general alarm, which gives us six minutes to get from our bed to the appropriate position on the ship, ready to put out fires, patch around damage, and return fire on the “enemy”.  Many of us will probably “die” during that time; in fact, if the ship were to receive the amount of simulated damage for real, we probably wouldn’t make it home.  This is intentional – there is no way to disguise from the crew the fact that we are not in real combat.

There are certain levels of stress that can’t be simulated, because everybody knows that they will get to go home to see their families; the worry of dying isn’t present in a training environment.  Instead, we are overloaded and overstressed; constant exercises will ensure that we are kept on edge.  It is a different kind of stress than real-world combat would provide, but by stressing the crew during exercise, we will ensure our capability if our training is required in the real world.

As Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit once said:

The more we sweat in peace, the less we bleed in war.

This is the guiding principle of work-ups, and something I will strive to remember when I’m pulled out of my rack at oh-dark-stupid to fight another smoke-machine fire.