Anyone who has been in the military knows what SNAFU means. For those who weren’t in any of the armed services, the polite version is, Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. That seems to sum up perfectly the year 2008. It doesn’t get any worse than what we have just been through.

Actually, I have been in several places in my life where things have gone as badly as they have this past year. One of them was my first year on board ship in the Navy. This is worth reading; it’s as funny as any military humor I have ever read and does lead to the point of this article.

A large naval vessel has to have a sanitary waste system. You cannot pump sewage overboard inside of 12 miles of the coast. Our system was particularly complex, why? It’s the Navy! It looked like a heart transplant. There were at least six different alignment possibilities that could store, pump, transfer, vent, discharge overboard, boil off the water or pump the sludge. It never worked properly. And this baby was mine! As the junior Ensign, newest officer of the Wardroom, I got the poop system.

We had a new Commanding Officer coming on board for a quick one-day cruise before he took command. The idea was to give him a chance to see the ship and crew underway. We started our preparations to get underway, which of course included shifting the sanitation system from its shore hook up to its underway setup.

Normally, I did the set up and shift from shore to the at sea settings.  I wanted to be certain there were no foul ups. You definitely don’t want to start pumping sewage all over the pier as you are leaving port. It will ruin your whole day.

This particular day my C.O wanted me to stay on the bridge, so I had my first class, Crusher, that was really his nickname, take care of making all the changes to the valves to make sure the sewage got where it was supposed to go. I had been over it with him a hundred times.

Everything was going along fine. The new C.O. and the current C.O. were outside the bridge on the Bridge wing, doing what C.O.s do, talking and drinking coffee.

I noticed they were both wiping their hair and brushing what looked like flecks of dirt or particles off their clothing. Neither seemed too concerned about it, but several of the crew on the forward part of the ship were also brushing themselves off. In fact, one crewmember literally lifted his hands to see if it had started to rain.

You guessed it! Crusher had misaligned the valves for the poop system and the internal pumps were pushing the solid portions of the holding tank up through the gas vent tube, which of course ran along the side of the bridge, directly above where the C.O.s were standing. About a dozen crewmembers were treated to a shower of, yup, you guessed it.

That is a SNAFU. Almost 30 years later and I am still laughing about that one.

That’s how this past year has impressed me. Misaligned valves that pumped sewage all over everyone. The exception is that it wasn’t an inexperienced kid who misaligned the valves, it was the best and the brightest, the leaders of the biggest and most powerful financial juggernaut of the ages, the cream of the crop.

This is almost my twentieth year in the money business and it is the first time I have ever been ashamed of my profession. What has gone on is inexcusable, bailing them out is the icing on the cake, but it had to be done.

If it were an isolated incident, it might be a little more palatable, but this is ridiculous. Virtually every firm is in trouble for no other reason than a complete lack of judgment. They seem to have abandoned all reason, forgotten all the lessons learned for the past 70 or 80 years.

The most recent mantra from the Wall Street elite is that Congress mandated all the changes that led to the problems in mortgages and then the credit markets. Maybe so, but since when does congress make the decisions about what firms do with their money. In fact, since I have been in the business, no one has ever believed that congress was anything but a bunch of incompetent bloodsuckers.

Talk about a SNAFU! Despite the best efforts of Congress and Wall Street, we will survive. We will be better for it and hopefully will learn from it. Too bad it is going to cost so much to fix.

There have been several times in the past few months when I felt like going outside, just like that sailor did on the deck of my ship, and put my hands out to see if the sky really was falling. It seemed to be raining something on us for most of the year.

The new Obama Administration takes over in 2009 and promises a new way, new ideas, new people and the hope for a better tomorrow. Let’s hope someone checks to make sure all the valves are in the proper position. But just in case, don’t stand anywhere near that vent tube.

Source: 2008, The Year of SNAFU