What's the most unusual way you have seen someone receive notification of promotion?

Just called the PFC up during formation, face was stunned and confused as I put rank on chest and Top pinned his cover.

1987 Korea, friend got his LES statement from a gut truck his food was wrapped in in the village and it showed he had been promoted, he received his actual orders a day later.

I haven't been blessed to see one that was extraordinary

Way back when I was enlisted, I received a promotion from SPC to SPC. I was promoted to SGT thr next day. Apparently we had a horrible clerk typist, as I was not the first nor ladt person this happened to.

My unit administrator called me at home a couple of days before annual training was to begin, and told me that he was not going to tolerate my looking like a rag bag anymore. I consistently was awarded best uniform for my first three years. He told me to report in a day early to be inspected.
When I got there my parents and fiancé were in the office with our battalion CO, who was the officer to swear me in at enlistment. I was such a gullible kid that I was really worried that I was in trouble.

I don't know if this one belongs with the other stories here, but here goes: I was on my first deployment to Iraq. My chain of demand and NCO abort channel were already giving me crap like normal (found out later that I should have turned them in for racial discrimination). I was pushed away from my unit in Mosul to go and set up & run the Squadron FECC by myself in Rawah, on the north side of the Euphrates. The day BEFORE I left, my orders for SGT came down (about f---ing time). My "leadership" KNEW they had come down and they held them from me because they just knew that the heavy fighting down there would claim my life, so that they wouldn't have to promote me. Well, I lived. I came back to Mosul about two days before Christmas. Still no promotion. I didn't know about it until my LES came out in February! AND MY ORDERS CAME DOWN ON THE 25TH OF SEPTEMBER!!! Then they tried to say that my orders were bogus and held my promotion from me! So after about 40 days of fighting them over my chevrons, I came to shift and my first-line looked at me & said, "You're out of uniform! Go put your rank on!" He had the sour look on his face as if he consumed a lemon factory! No ceremony like my peers, no special formation, no congratulations, no hand-shaking, NOTHING that everyone else received for making rank! Just a "g--damn, he made it! Now I can't keep him under heel anymore! F---!" look from him for the rest of the deployment and the rest of my time in Alaska. So that's my "promotion story."

I found out I was promoted to E-4 when I received my pay voucher once in Saudi Arabia after being called up for Desert Storm. It was effective before we left Fort Benning.

While stationed in Germany I had just presented my part of the weekly Wing CC stand-up briefing, and the CC said, "Not a bad Master Sergeant briefing". As everyone was leaving afterward he came up to congratulate me and told me not to tell my unit CC as he would not know until the next day, and to act surprised when he would then inform me. Made me feel pretty good to be recognized by someone outside my chain of command.

I was standing in line for a urinalysis when the SGT in front of me noticed a problem with the paperwork. He said the rank was wrong because the paper said SSG and he was only a SGT. The nice SFC from HQ said no he was a SSG that she had processed his paperwork a couple weeks ago.

Got my promotion order in the mail. When I called my unit, they said, go buy some rank insignia and pin them on. No ceremony for my E-5.