Back in the ninety's I was a skiff man on a salmon seiner off of Kodiak Island. We got a new deck hand from Portland Oregon who was a faithful follower of Curt Cobain and was questionable from first sight standing there in his grunge outfit. He tried at first until we were at port offloading salmon by hand into a brailer in the fish hold and this fella is plumb stuck in slow motion. Having a bit of rank I barked to "start flipping those fish in the brailer bag" and he replied he could not. To which just short of loosing my damn mind I hollered "why the hell not", his reply was that the fish were all staring at him. At this point I did lose my mind and screamed, "start throwing those damn fish, this is the least of your problems right at this point in time". To which he did unenthusiastically. I knew at this point this fella had just checked out and was never going to be a good hand and was when I decided to name him "Shorty", which was the only name I called him by for near four months. While up on the docks one day with a bunch of other fishermen he finally got the nerve to ask me as to why I called him shorty as he was taller than I. To which I replied "I never said what you were short of, you're short of brains". Well the other fishermen laughed pretty good and Shorty, he finally knew where he really stood.
While it may seem rough on a fella, there's not a lot of time to get a guy dependable to do what is needed to be done, when it needs to be done as our lives depended on each others actions. While I usually played the "good guy" and would explain and teach what the skipper needed and let the skipper be the "bad guy", this wasn't one of those times as this fella already checked out and wanted to be somewhere else. It's better if he does so, for him and the rest of the crew.
