That's a great story.The ability to type made my boot camp a breeze. I spent all of my time in the Batallion office while my buddies were marching in the Orlando sun. Our Bat commander was a WO taking classes to advance. One day he gave me some of his homework to type up. This guy was even worse in English than I was. When I got the papers, I timidly knocked on his door and asked if he wanted me to correct the grammar and spelling. He bowed up at first, then, on reflection, he gave me his school work to do, not just type. I was pretty much relieved of all of the normal boot camp experience.
Hell, I was probably promoted to to Ensign before I got out of boot camp!
When I was in Army Officer Candidate School ( which was a mostly miserable high-stress sleep deprived harassment program) with a 60% washout rate my hut mates noticed early on that I was somewhat of a whiz at cleaning M-16 rifles so quickly and thoroughly that the Cadre could find nothing to gig me on during the almost daily inspections like they did on everyone's rifles and all our other stuff. When they found anything wrong ( and they almost always did) what followed was screaming, yelling, cursing, and ripping our beds and uniform displays apart and throwing our stuff on the floor, out the windows, and up in the rafters. Then we only got an hour or less to make everything right again for a remedial inspection, which was basically impossible due to the short timeo allowed; followed by more yelling and other unpleasantness.
Often these fun and games were still going on until midnight.
After a couple of weeks my squad mates offered me a deal-if I would clean all their rifles, they would pitch in and keep my boots and shoes polished, sweep the floor in my area, make up my bunk and press my uniforms to the highest standards as required by the TAC Officers who ruled over us. I took them up on it and it all worked out great.
I believe I got the better part of the deal.
And I graduated.
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