Angry Ginger!

This one story always stands out in my mind. My officer, he loved what our job was but he wasn’t involved very often. So every once in a while he would just kind of want to take the reins and be a part of it. So I took him in with me one day and he just wanted to log an hour behind the camera. Its window-based software so it’s not a difficult system to operate, the payload we call it. So he’s going through the process of trying to coordinate air space and this is done over the radio. And he’s not getting any reply and he’s trying to hail them like ten times. He finally gets a response and this guy is yelling at him over the radio. And it’s a civilian at the air traffic control tower and all we were trying to do was we were trying to conduct a, get the authorization to send our bird through the air space to the AO. And he’s getting yelled at over the radio and I was like, “Sir, pass me that radio right now please!” So he passes me the radio and I just, it was like that Will Farrell moment from Old School where he’s at the debate and he just glazes over. I don’t know what I said, I can’t remember what I said. All I know is that I hammered this guy over the radio. I gave him back the radio and he was impressed apparently. We never heard that guy on the radio again from air traffic control for the remainder of the tour and from that moment on he dubbed me “Angry Ginger!” It’s still to this day it’s my call sign I guess, “Angry Ginger!” Those are one of those funny things that always sort of stood out and I like to tell that story every once in a while. I was talking to him about that not too long ago actually and you know it’s a good laugh.