Things you can do to an officer

You can easily stop an officer from being promoted to the next rank or office, or you can stop him receiving a medal, which he basically deserves. This is to make him serve better, you understand.

Alternatively, don’t stop his promotion. Just retain him in the navy for a while, for an extra period of time – and it’s best not to specify how long so he really feels the time passing.

You can refuse to let an officer enrol in the naval academy or any sort of refresher course for officers. By all means, let him enrol if you will, but only on the last day, when it’s too late. There’s a higher purpose to all of this: it’s so he should feel, you know, really understand, so his tiny little brain finally comprehends… that things can’t really go his way.

You can prevent him from going ashore, assuming he’s a naval officer, or you can grant him some personal “org. time”: a sort of probation for him to get it together. You can also let him ashore for such small nuggets of time that he finally gets it: he’s going to have to behave himself from now on.

Or you can send him somewhere on an assignment that pays much less, where he won’t get the northern allowance.

You can extend his active service for another term, or a third or even a forth. Or you can keep sending him out to sea, to the artillery testing grounds, to do military surveillance, to some godforsaken hell-hole, and that’s if he’s lucky. And don’t provide him with a flat so his wife has to leave the garrison…

Because who’s going to renew her residence permit when her husband’s so far away?

Or you can decide to give him a flat after all. “There you go… now, who says we don’t look after you?” Don’t give it to him immediately, though, wait at least five years – maybe eight or fifteen, maybe even eighteen – let him serve a bit longer, give the man a chance to prove himself.

You can also reprimand the bastard or give him a warning followed by a severe warning, and finally some sort of “official warning about the non-conformity of his fulfilment of service”. Announce it and then just sit back and watch how he reacts. Or you can arrange things so he never gets another job despite ten years of “irre proach able service” and he’ll rot in the navy, taking test after test (after test, after test) for the “right to independent authority”.

You can start monitoring every step he takes, not just aboard ship but in his private life, too. You can organise sudden checks for any “missing” items, com missions, training exercises, presentations and alarms.

Or you can refuse to give him a reference or “letter of recommendation”. You can, of course, decide to give him this letter of recommendation after all, but of the sort that he’ll end up spitting out bile for a long time after wards when he reads it.

Or you can make sure he doesn’t get his annual pay increase and only a fraction, or perhaps none, of his bonus. You can leave him no annual leave, or leave him some leave but at a time of year when no normal person would take a holiday. Or you sign all the papers for his leave but you take his plane ticket and stick it in a safe somewhere, while you yourself go off for a week’s holiday – he can rush about in a panic, but it won’t help.

Or you can make him work through his holiday, checking that he’s there every single day – you can even arrange for him to report to you hourly about his where abouts. Or, come to think of it, you can lock him up, that son of a bitch, put him in the cooler! Um, the guard house, I mean…

And only let him out of there to the open sea! Only to the open sea!

Or you can transfer him to the reserves when he really doesn’t want that or, on the contrary, refuse to transfer him when his soul aches for the reserves. Let him fret about it, let him foam at the mouth.

Or you can cut his pension to far less than he’d hoped for, or miscalculate how many years he’s served when he’s about to retire – let him suffer; or pay out his salary a day before the full month is up or a day before the full year, so he’s one day short of earning his full pension.



So basically, there are a million and one things you can.

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