Idiot Scoutmasters: I'm The Idiot Scoutmaster!

I've had this Idiot Scoutmaster series going for quite a while now.  When you spend over a decade in the Boys Scouts you are bound to come up with a few head-scratching moments from your adult leaders.  However, I got to thinking.  Yes, I know it's a dangerous thing to do.  But I looked at it from the other end.

I was an Assistant Scoutmaster for two years.  Was I perfect?  The definite answer is a resounding, "No."  So this story is about the time I was the Idiot Scoutmaster.  Yes, I am admitting that even I screw up.

When I became an Assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 180 out of Lutz, Fl. there had been a shift in youth members.  They had lost a lot of  boys to turning sixteen.  I know you are thinking, "But aren't the boys allowed to be youth members until their eighteenth birthday?"  Yes.  That is true.

But when they turn sixteen they start driving, and become more interested in girls than Scouting.
I heard one of my own Scoutmasters say, "We've got to get these boys to Eagle by fifteen, or else they'll never get it."  ("It" being Eagle.)  Again, the subjects of girls and cars were brought up.

So Troop 180 was in the middle of a member shift.  It mostly consisted of Scouts that were one to two years removed from Webelos.  So they were quite young and inexperienced.  I remember the first campout that I somehow ended up being in charge of for the first hour.  I was running ragged answering question after question.  They were coming at me like a machine gun.

That was one of my stronger moments.  But like I said earlier, I've had my Idiot Scoutmaster moments.  It all started with two of the Scouts doing something extremely stupid.  I can't remember what.  But I was giving them unholy hell for doing it.

That's when I said/yelled, "You're acting like a bunch of God Damned twelve year olds!"  Yeah, not one of my better moments.  It was then that one of the Scouts said back to me, "But I'm ten!"  I didn't quite know what to say to that.

So I calmed down a bit, and thought about the situation.  I realized I was dealing with not just kids, but ten year old kids.  They were inexperienced, and when it came to communicating with youth so was I.  So I learned something new that day.

I screwed up a bit, but I tried to be a better Scoutmaster because I now knew what I was working with.  Also, the Scouts quit doing whatever dumb thing I yelled at them for.  So they learned a bit as well.

Does this mean I'm going to quit posting, "Idiot Scoutmaster" stories?  Hell no.  I'm sitting on a goldmine of stupidity stories.  I can't let that go.  But look at this way.  The Scoutmasters who were idiots will have stories told about them, and those who weren't will not.

For further reading, here is my Idiot Scoutmaster collection:

Bored Scoutmasters and the Tale of the Wampus

https://angjellockheart.blogspot.com/2014/07/bored-scoutmasters-and-tale-of-wampus.html

Idiot Scoutmasters: A True Story of a Scout's Canteen

https://angjellockheart.blogspot.com/2018/09/idiot-scoutmasters-true-story-of-scouts.html

Idiot Scoutmasters: Once Bitten, Forever Stupid

https://angjellockheart.blogspot.com/2019/01/idiot-scoutmasters-once-bitten-forever.html

Idiot Scoutmasters: The Dishwashing Paradox

https://angjellockheart.blogspot.com/2019/02/idiot-scoutmasters-dishwashing-paradox.html

Idiot Scoutmasters: The Idiot Committee

https://angjellockheart.blogspot.com/2019/12/idiot-scoutmasters-idiot-committee.html

Here's a post that goes back over a decade.  This was posted on my old Myspace Blog.

Adrian reminisces about his childhood days with the Boy Scouts

https://angjellockheart.blogspot.com/2011/02/adrian-reminisces-about-his-childhood.html

Idiot Scoutmasters: The Dishwashing Paradox

This post is a continuation of my "Idiot Scoutmaster" series.  I spent a long time in the Boy Scouts of America, and dealt with a lot of idiot Scoutmasters.  Admittedly, they were volunteers and not professionals, but I still question a lot of their so-called logic to this day.

The Boy Scouts of America have a certain way to wash dishes.  It's actually a very good method.  Basically it goes like this.  You have three tubs.

The first tub is the hot water and soap tub.  This is not really any different than washing dishes at home.  You have hot water, soap, and a brush/rag.  Again, just like washing dishes at home.

The second tub is a cold water and bleach solution tub.  This is known as the cold rinse pot/tub.  So just in case the hot water and soap wasn't enough the bleach in the second tub will kill everything.

This leads to the third tub.  This is just hot water for rinsing.  Hence the name, rinse pot/tub.  The clear hot water will clean off any bleach that is remaining.  After that, hand dry and put away the dishes.  Easy right?

Well my Scoutmaster Mr. Brasher had other ideas about dishwashing.  We only used two pots since that's all that would fit on the Coleman stove.  But Mr. Brasher had a secret to dishwashing.  Let it be known that I am quoting him exactly.

"You want the dish water to be so hot that you can't touch it three times."

This, of course, lead me to the thought, "Well, how can I wash the dishes if I can't actually touch them?"  And when I say he wanted the water hot I mean like this.

I honestly saw him do this weird quick move with his finger three times in the hot water.  He would then say, it wasn't hot enough.  I looked at him like the idiot he was.  He had what looked like a trigger-finger move for quickly touching the hot water three times quickly.  He kept doing it about every minute until his finger was burned enough that he couldn't stick it back in the water.

Seriously, it hurts to even remember this.  I know what you're thinking, "Well Boy Scout, why didn't you let the dishes soak for ten minutes before you attempted to wash them?"  I have an answer you might not have thought about.

You see, I am in Florida.  I've put a thermometer in the sun during the Florida summertime.  It hit 130 degrees F. in the sun.  So think about this.  Boiling water is 212 F.  The temperature in Florida is 95 F. in the shade, and 130 F. in the sun.  So just how long will it take for the temperature of a boiling pot of water to come down to manageable levels?

Let me tell you the answer.  It doesn't.  It doesn't come down to manageable levels.  No matter how long you wait it will still burn your hands.

Since the first pot is so blasted hot Mr. Brasher figured we didn't need a second bleach tub.  So the dishes would go from the first pot (boiling water and soap), to a second pot that was just... you guessed it... more boiling water.

I'll admit, the dishes were clean, but it took us Scouts an hour to wash dishes.  And remember, we'd have to do this three times a day.  Honestly, we spent most of our time just cooking and then washing dishes on campouts.  Literally six hours a day was devoted to just cooking and washing dishes.

Now maybe that's not a bad thing.  I do cook well, and I've never had complaints about my dish washing.  So I do have to thank Scouting for that.  But I will say this.  When I wash dishes I make sure NOT to use boiling water.  Hot?  Yes.  Boiling?  No.

For more of my interesting Scouting stories follow these links:

Idiot Scoutmasters: Once Bitten, Forever Stupid

Idiot Scoutmasters: A True Story of a Scout's Canteen

Bored Scoutmasters and the Tale of the Wampus

Adrian reminisces about his childhood days with the Boy Scouts

Idiot Scoutmasters: Once Bitten, Forever Stupid

Last year I decided I would write blog posts about stupid things my Scoutmasters had done while I was in the Boy Scouts of America.  This is my second article.

Here is the first:

Idiot Scoutmasters: A True Story of a Scout's Canteen


My story again revolves around my Scoutmaster, Mr. Brasher.  Needless to say, he had a alternative way of teaching us boys.  When it came to First Aid, he had a belief that immersion was a better teacher than learning by the book or from a teacher.

We were at some sort of camping event with other troops.  We would go to one station, and learn First Aid.  We would then go to another station, and study something else.  Well, it was a few hours after we had learned First Aid, and we were being instructed about another subject.

Out of nowhere I saw Mr. Brasher screaming like he was in pain, as he started running around like a chicken with its head cut off.  It was then I heard him scream, "It bit me!  It bit me!"

I thought, "He's just been bit by a snake!!!"  It only took 0.02 seconds later for me to realize that he was acting like he had just been bitten by a snake to see what we would do.  Still, this kind of behavior had become normalized to me.  I was the first one to run up, and yell at him to, "stay calm!"
A few hours earlier at our First Aid class we had learned the importance of keeping a snake bit victim calm.  We were told to tackle the person if needed.  Anything to keep them from running around, and increasing their heartrate.

As a twelve year old I was proud that I was the first one to grab him, and yell at him to keep calm.  You know, he actually kept up the act yelling back at me that, "He was bit by a snake!  It bit me!  It bit me here!"  But now that I think back on the incident, it's weird how normalized that sort of behavior became to me.  But then again, I was only twelve.

The real kicker was that Mr. Brasher actually had a snake.  A rubber snake.  He had brought a rubber snake along on the camping trip just to pull off that stunt.  That's the kind of mindset I had to deal with.