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

I have two, one I heard of and the second happened to me.

A 19 year FC1 (Fire Controlman 1st Class) was busy doing maintenance/repair work to a NSSMS launcher onboard the Harry S Truman. FCC Ennis walks out to the launcher and orders him down from the launcher because Chief Petty Officers don't do maintenance. Happened about 8 months before I got there.

I was FC3 Henry at the time and at a Cableway Inspection school at NAS Norfolk on finals day. It was my turn to find three faults and identify them. They had to be different from everyone else's. While I am doing a quick scan for faults, a Senior Chief walks in with the advancement results hot off the printer. Said no one, but me advanced to the next rate. I was considerably upset because Senior Chief completely broke my train of thought and I had been hearing that BS for about 2-2.5 months straight without end. frankly was quite tired of it. Also I thought he too was yanking my chain until I saw the result. I couldn't have had a bigger "oh shit" look on my face.

I showed up to night shift and am promptly told-by my 2nd boss- that the MO wanted to see me. I replied with "Why me? I'm just an airman.." To which he replied "No you're not!" I was taken back for a moment, then he reminded me to maintain that surprised response when talking with the 'big guy', since he enjoyed popping that news on junior enlisted.

My nephew is a Seabee which has been a notoriously difficult field for promotion in the Navy for the last several years. He had been stuck at 2nd Class Petty Officer for quite a while. A few years back he was on leave during the holiday period and got a call from one of his buddies asking if he was coming to the unit Christmas party. He told him he didn't feel like coming in off leave. His buddy told him, "You need to show up." He said again that he didn't want to. His buddy replied, "No, you NEED to show up." He went to the party and got CAP'd to 1st Class.

I don't have a good story like these...I was fighting a med. discharge and working at processioning recruits into AIT and the Co. told me I deserved a higher rank than PFC but his hands where tied because of the pending discharge.....when the papers came through he threatened to hide my bags.....I told him to give me a POP and I would be his for my full 20...still miss the service and I left in 2000

Good one! 1stSgt talked our ears off for an hour on the parade deck. I was a Terminal Lance so I was zoned out counting the days until sep. At the end of the formation he was like, "Oh yeah McDowell, somebody left these on my desk for you". He tossed me a little red box of Corporal chevrons and walked off. I didn't know what to make out of it until the Company Commander came over to pin them on. For two days I thought they were messing with me until I got made a squad leader. Looking back I'm glad that my chain was aware that I had hit salty status and were involved enough to give me grief about the promotion.

I have the best of both worlds: I'm in the Navy Reserves, and I work for the Army as a civilian. In my civilian job in medical simulation research, we developed a trauma trainer lower torso: double amputations that could move. A training site built a platform so a human could hide his legs and be the upper half. One of the instructors, an E5 (as I remember) played the injured Soldier and was promoted in that position.

I was attached to an air cav unit (I was an air defense guy) as a pfc over in Iraq in '03-04. I worked for the S3 SGM, a 19D, who took my buddy and me under his wing.

One month my LES randomly said Spc well before any automatic promotion should have kicked in. Well, he found out eventually and came out to the guard tower I was manning at about midnight asking where the hell I was at. It was a three man shift with a cot in the base of the tower for the third man to get some sleep, and of course I was sleeping when he showed up. He fake chewed me out for sleeping on duty before I was pinned that night at the base of the tower.

Turns out my home unit had put me in early then neglected to tell anyone.

While stationed at U-Tapao in Thailand, I dumped a generator off a forklift. Later, the squadron commander at the time, a 1st Lt. held a meeting and told several of us that we had been promoted. To me, he said that I was getting promoted to pay for the generator which did not happen but scared the pee what out of me at the time.

Our ship was getting ready to go through SMC I was was told by my XO that every space place with my name needed to be changed, which was almost every supply space on our ship (I had just recently gotten married). The mess decks had recently been refurbished and I tried to explain to the XO that the deck was still tacky. I was told to figure it out and to have all the spaces done by 0700 tomorrow (it was 1400) I hung from pipes through the overheads, climbed, and crawled, to get to some these spaces. My Chief said "no Liberty till it's finished so I managed to be the most limber and nimble sailor that day. At 0710 the next morning I got called to the XO's office "Did you finish CS1?" Sir yes sir, (why did he just call me CS1 did he suddenly forget I'm a CS2?) "Carry on than CS2 (ok must have been a slip) I expect to see you at CO's call". At 0800 the CO called me up during CO's call "congratulations CS2 you are now CS1." I stared at the XO in disbelief. "Do you have anything to say?" Yes Sir, does this mean I have to change all the space plaques again? "Again? What do you mean?" I explained the story to the CO he chuckled a bit looked at the XO shaking his head and said "no the SMC was cancelled last week, both your Chief and the XO knew that before this task was given, however I can only imagine what you went through to get to those spaces, do it when you can." All those bruises squeezing into those spaces and doing crazing things from the overhead and pipes and we never even did an SMC inspection that year.

A friend recently got a phone call with out of cycle promotion results in late September. "Hey, you made Senior, effective sew on date 1 Sept so you're getting a little bit of back pay"