Posted on 05/18/2014 6:28:24 PM PDT by US Navy Vet
HOW TO SIMULATE BEING A SAILOR
1. Buy a steel dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months.
2. Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls.
3. Repaint your entire house every month using gray paint.
4. Renovate your bathroom. Lower all showerheads to four and one-half feet off the deck.
5. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.
6. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn water heater temperature up to 300 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turn water heater off.
7. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they used too much water during the week, so no bathing will be allowed.
8. Put 5W-20 lube oil in your humidifier, instead of water, and set it on high.
9. Leave your lawn mower running in your living room 24 hours a day to maintain proper ambient noise level.
10. Once a month, disassemble all your major appliances and electric garden tools, inspect them and then reassemble them. Do this every week with your lawnmower, weed whacker and other gasoline powered tools.
11. Once a week blow compressed air up through your chimney, making sure the wind carries the soot across and onto your neighbor's house. Laugh at him when he curses you.
12. Raise the thresholds and lower the headers of your front and back doors, so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
13. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling, so you can't turn over without getting out and then getting back in.
14. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
15. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your spouse whip open the curtain about 4 hours after you go to sleep, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and say "Sorry, wrong rack."
16. Make each member your family qualify to operate each appliance in your house i.e., dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc.
17. Find the dumbest guy in the neighborhood and make him your boss for the next two years.
18. Have your neighbor come over each day at 5 am, blow a whistle so loud Helen Keller could hear it, and shout "Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up."
19. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she's going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in your back yard at 0600 (6 A.M.) while she reads it to you.
20. Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep the driveway three times a day, whether it needs it or not.
21. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item before delivering it to you.
22. Watch no TV except for movies played in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, and then show a different one.
23. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone shouting that your home is under attack and ordering them to their battle stations.
24. Post a menu on the kitchen door informing your family that they are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for an hour. When they finally get to the kitchen, tell them you are out of steak, but they can have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they ignore the menu and just ask for hot dogs.
25. Bake a cake. Prop up one side of the pan so the cake bakes unevenly. Spread icing real thick to level it off.
26. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread.
27. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. At the alarm, jump up and dress as fast as you can, making sure to button your top shirt button and tuck your pants into your socks. Run out into the back yard and uncoil the garden hose.
28. Every week or so, throw your cat or dog into the pool and shout, "Man overboard port side!" Rate your family members on how fast they respond.
29. Put the headphones from your stereo on your head, but don't plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck on a string. Stand in front of the stove, and speak into the paper cup "Stove manned and ready." After an hour or so, speak into the cup again "Stove secured." Roll up the headphones and paper cup and stow them in a shoebox.
30. Place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4-hour intervals. This is best done when the weather is worst. January is a good time.
31. When there is a thunderstorm in your area, get a wobbly rocking chair, sit in it and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. Make sure to have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket.
32. Buy a trash compactor but only use it once a week. Store up garbage in your bathtub.
33. Invite at least 375 people, most of whom you don't really like, to come and live with you for about 6 months.
34. Lock-wire the lug nuts on your car wheels.
35. Start your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere, to ensure the engine is properly "lit off".
36. Walk around your car for 4 hours checking the tire pressure every 15 minutes.
37. Make coffee using eighteen scoops of budget priced coffee grounds per pot, and allow the pot to simmer for 5 hours before drinking.
38. Have the paperboy give you a haircut with sheep shears.
39. Submit a request form to your father-in-law, asking if it's OK for you to leave your house before 1500 (3 PM).
40. Take a two-week vacation visiting the Far East, and call it "world travel".
41. Lock yourself and your family in the house for six weeks. Tell them that at the end of the 6th week you are going to take them to Disney World for "liberty." At the end of the 6th week, inform them the trip to Disney World has been canceled because they need to get ready for an inspection, and it will be another week before they can leave the house.
42. Needle gun the aluminum siding on your house after your neighbors have gone to bed.
Now, who's ready to go back to sea?
Been there, done that, got the Sea Service Ribbon.
I slept beneath the catapult stops on an aircraft carrier. Whenever they launched an aircraft the catapult would slam against the stops so it sounded like someone was slamming a pallet on the floor above you. I could go to sleep between launches and never hear them.
I made a play for a stateroom on the 02 level to get away from the chain dropping guy. Ended up with a weapons elevator as a neighbor. Totally sucked.
After having read this this old Army guy wishes he had gone Navy! ;-)
Active Duty ping.
I’ve seen these before, and while there’s some truth in some of them, it’s a rather cynical look at being in the Navy.
SUBMARINE UPDATE:
From http://www.johntreed.com/what-US-nuclear-sub-life-is-really-like.html
Here are some of the most illustrative examples of life on a submarine for me:
Ensure that every room in your house is drastically different in temperature. If no condensation appears when you open a door, the temperature difference is not great enough. Make sure your bedroom only has two temperatures (100F or 20F) and nothing between. Make sure of hourly cycles throughout the night.
Make sure all your personal belongings will fit in a 2’X2’ space that has lots of cables running through it.
Buy bunk beds (3 high type) and convert the narrowest hallway in your home into a bedroom.
Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Two to three hours after you fall asleep, have your wife whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and mumble “Sorry, wrong rack”.
Install a Furnace and Air Conditioner that blows directly on you while you are sleeping. Have the controls so they will cycle to hot and cold in a matter of seconds.
Every so often, yell “Emergency Deep”, run into the kitchen, and sweep all pots/pans/dishes off of the counter onto the floor. Then, yell at your wife for not having the place “stowed for sea”.
Shut off all the breakers in the house and yell “reactor scram’. Sit in the dark for at least an hour.
Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub and move the shower head down to chest level. Shower once a week. Use no more than 2 gallons of water per shower.
(Optional for Nukes and A-Div) Leave lawnmower running in your living room six hours a day for proper noise level.
Fill laundry tubs with oil. Lay in them, on your back, and change the washers on the water spigots.
While doing laundry, replace liquid fabric softener with diesel Fuel... savor the aroma of AMR2LL.
Whenever someone enters a room you’re cleaning, shout “up and over” at them so they’ll go through the attic to get to the kitchen.
Hookup your air compressor to the sewer line to the house and blow a sh*t geyser ten feet in the air. Come inside and tell your wife calmly, “I forgot to shut the valve”. Make her and the kids clean up the mess. Vent your septic into the house and yell “venting sanitaries inboard”.
Practice walking quickly with your back to the wall. Smash your forehead or shins with a hammer every two days to simulate collision injuries sustained aboard Navy ships.
Cut a hole in the floor of your house and install some batteries. Go down there once a day and take specific gravities.
Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up (about 10 inches is a good distance) then place it on a platform that is four feet off the floor. Place a small dead animal under the bed to simulate the smell of your bunkmate’s sock.
Set your alarm to go off at 10 minute intervals for the first hour of sleep to simulate the various times the watchstanders and night crew bump around and wake you up. Place your bed on a rocking table to ensure you are tossed around the remaining three hours. Make use of a custom clock that randomly simulates fire alarms, police sirens, helicopter crash alarms, and a new wave rock band.
Mount as many sharp-cornered lockers as you can in all the most traveled halls of your house. Leave almost room to squeeze by.
Run a tube from your car’s exhaust pipe into your living room, yell “prepare to snorkel”, and start the car. You must breathe the fumes for one hour.
And dropping it off in a construction site and taking it completely apart again every 8-12 months.
Sound powered phones. Usually located in a box in the space you were in. You plugged them into a special socket and could talk to others on the same circuit or they could patch circuits together in Engineering Central.
pfl
SOUNDS GREAT WHERE DO I SIGN UP
That is a good one, I was a 1LT on LPH-12 USS Inchon, most of the O,s were on the O-2 level below the flight deck. The CO was not really liked by just about everybody, during watch at night all the troops knew where his stateroom was so it just happened that a lot of chains were dropped or dragged there. It could explain why he was torqued off most of the time.
“When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.”
I did that Friday when the sewer backed up at the house.
Its a good day to be at sea.
No offense..but to an old drafted Army VN grunt....That sounds like heaven!....*W*
One more: Chew up your string beans, so when you puke they won’t stick in your nose.
I miss the rainbow sheen of diesel atop my cool, coal-black coffee. And horsec0ck and American cheese sandwiches with cool-aid (same rainbow sheen) for mid rats.
Hell, I miss going to sea:(
I was on WWII subs in 1951. My bunk was situated so that the lower half of my body was alongside the bowplane motor. A couple of times the guys on the bowplanes in the control room would run them down to the stops. A loud THWOCK! and a bright flash would follow. More than got my attention.
Something he taught me as a kid, and I will take to my grave: There are (or were at the time he taught me) only three boats in the Navy: the admiral's launch, a patrol boat, and a submarine. Everything else is a ship. What surprises me today, is how when I speak to young sailors they will refer to a DD as a boat, or a CVN as a boat... My dad would have a fit to hear that were he still alive. I can relate though... I feel the same way when someone refers to a weapon's magazine as a clip!!!
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