Living Aboard Ship

It is difficult to describe living aboard a Navy ship to someone who has not experienced it. Here are a few things that occur while living aboard a Navy ship, and things that you can do at home to simulate them.

• Aircraft Maintenance
  • Have your father in-law (Squadron Maintenance Officer) set 20 unachievable goals on Monday morning with the promise that if they are achieved there will be liberty for whole family on Sunday. Have the entire family work 18-hour days for the entire week while your father in-law goes golfing. Achieve all the goals. Upon your father in-law’ return Saturday night, have him announce that due to operational commitments one of the following will occur: the duty section (1/3 of family) will have to work Sunday or liberty is canceled.  Do this for couple of years and then reward your father in-law with a promotion and a medal for superior operational readiness.
  • Purchase a beat up 30 year old car (aircraft).  Keep the following schedule to the letter and with accurate records of everything. Have three highly qualified people inspect the car before driving (preflight), then have a 16-year-old who just got his license and knows nothing about cars inspect it again. Have him drive the car as if it were a rented Corvette with full coverage insurance (flight ops). When he returns have him tell you everything his one month of vast experience tells him is wrong, using vague phrases. Have three people inspect the car (Post flight/Daily inspection) and the next morning. even though the car has not moved, have three people re-inspect it. Every third day replace the alternator in the car before driving. Every 7, 14, 28 and 56 days, take one section of the car apart and then reassemble it. Every 128 days take the entire car apart and then reassemble it.
  • Wash and wax all the cars on your block once a week in the rain to simulate washing aircraft. Have a 10-year old neighbor kid quality check the work and tell you all the places you missed.
    
• Battle Lanterns. Install flashlights around the house where you can bump into them or bang you head against them. Point each flashlight at important items, such as the sofa, doorways, or the stove. Occasionally turn the house’s electric power off and run around turning on all the flashlights.
• Being a Deck Seaman. Spend 5 years working at McDonald’s, and NOT get promoted.
• Berthing
  • Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up and place the whole bed 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 socks.
  • Four hours after you go to sleep, have your wife whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and mumble, "Sorry wrong rack.”
  • Go from house to house in your neighborhood when you need a place to sleep. Climb in the closest empty bed. The owner will wake you up when they want to sleep. It is called “hot racking.”
  • Install a fluorescent lamp on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books to simulate laying in a rack.
  • Keep the bedroom thermostat at 50 degrees and use only a thin blanket for warmth.
  • Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling.
  • Replace bedroom door with a curtain.
  • Set your alarm to go off at ten-minute intervals for the first hour of sleep to simulate the various times the watch standers and night crew bump around and wake you up.
  • Sleep on the shelf in your closet.
  • Stack all beds on top of one another in the closet. Stow all your clothing and possessions in a 36" x 18" x 12" closet.
    
• Bilges. Fill your basement with ten inches of sewage water, pump it out, clean up the mess, and paint everything in the basement gray.
• Ceremonies (such as retirements, change of command, and award ceremonies). Have entire family dress in their best clothes and stand in the sun for an hour without moving a muscle while your grandfather reads Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
• Chow
  • For mid-rats, Wake up every night and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. Optional: canned ravioli or cold soup.
  • Cook all your food blindfolded, groping for any seasoning you can reach. Fry everything and serve cold. Note: You must not gain weight on this diet or you will be singled out for the 'fat person' program.
  • For meals, have the family stand in long lines with a bunch or smelly, dirty mechanics, only to find that when you turn comes, most of the food is gone.
  • Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered and wait two weeks before eating them.
  • Post a menu on the refrigerator door informing your family that you are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for at least an hour, when they finally get to the kitchen, tell them that you are out of steak, but you have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they do not pay attention to the menu any more, they just ask for hot dogs.
  • Serve "Stuffed Cabbage Rolls" for dinner and the next evening strip off the cabbage leaves and serve the same thing calling it "Beef Porcupines."
  • Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for 5-6 days before drinking.
  • Use fresh milk for only two days after each port visit.
  • When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan so one side is 3 inches higher than the other side. Level it using lard frosting.
  • When making sandwiches, leave the bread out for six days, or until it is hard and stale.
• Communications. When talking to your wife drop every third word in your sentence to simulate using a ship to shore telephone.
  
• Deployment
  
  • Have your 5-year-old give you a haircut every two weeks.
  • Have your neighbor collect all your mail and deliver it once a month. Instruct them to trash every fifth item and to send every some mail randomly to other addresses.
  • Invite 200 to 1000 of your 'not so closest' friends to come over. Board up all the windows and doors to your house for six months. After 6 months, take down the boards so people can leave. However, since you and one third of the 'friends' cannot leave until the next day since you are on duty, wave at your family through the front window of your home.
  • Shower, eat, and sleep with the above-mentioned friends never more than an arm's length away. Instruct 10% of the 'friends' NOT to shower on a regular basis and an additional 10% NOT to change clothes more than once a month.
  •  Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world. Have a neighbor bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
• Drills
  • For a fire, periodically, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" and then restore power.
  • For a fire, set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed, get dressed as fast as you can, then run into your backyard and break out the garden hose.
  • For a fire, twice a week at 2:30 in the morning, sneak into the children’s room, ring a bell and yell though a bullhorn "Fire! Fire! Fire! There is a Class Alpha Fire in the kitchen!" Just as soon as they get dressed and start to run, yell, "This is a drill!"
  • For General Quarters, hut all doors and windows in the kitchen, turn the heat up, set off the smoke alarm, and then have each family member put on head phones, a long sleeve shirt buttoned at the collar, long pants with socks pulled over the cuffs, gloves, and a ski mask, put a pot over their head, put on a life preserver, and carry a full face swim mask as they run into the kitchen and stand by an assigned appliance. When they arrive, they are to yell "Stove (refrigerator, microwave, etc.) manned and ready." Then they must stand there for four hours doing nothing, not eating or drinking, or going to the bathroom. After four hours, they are to yell "Stove (refrigerator, microwave, etc.) secured,” and then return to their regular activities.
  • For General Quarters, when your children have been in bed for 3 hours, run into their room with a megaphone, and shout at the top of your lungs that your home is under attack, and order them to man their battle stations.
  • For Man Overboard, very so often, throw your cat into the swimming pool, shout "man overboard, ship recovery!"
  • Designate a closet in your house as a repair locker, equip it with firefighting gear, and assign family members to man it during drills. Then hold fire, smoke, and flooding drills every day.
    
• Dungarees. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.
• Electrical Boxes. Mount all power switch and outlet boxes on the outside of the wall at a level that will guarantee that you bang your elbow or snag your clothing on them.
• Electrical Items. Once a month, have an electrician certify as 'safe' and hang a tag on every electrical appliance you own.
• Engine Room
  • Install humidifiers throughout your house and fill them with a mixture of half water and half motor oil. Remove the muffler from your lawn mower and bring it into the house. Turn the heat up to 120 degrees and run the humidifiers and lawn mower constantly.
  • Lighting off the Engines. After starting your car, sit and watch the gauges, and let it run for four hours before going anywhere to ensure the engine is properly "lit off."
  • Sit in front of your kitchen stove for six hours. Look at nothing but the stove. Maintain a log entry of the position of all the knobs. Have your son randomly report to the kitchen "conditions normal" in the house. Have him randomly ask permission to turn on various appliances in the house. Grant him permission to start half of them, and have him immediately report the condition of the each appliance.
  • Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere. This is to ensure your engine is properly "lit off.”
• First few weeks of a deployment. Buy six months of food and supplies for the family and pile it on the on top of furniture, fixtures, and the floor in the bedrooms, dining room, kitchen, living room, basement, garage, and along the sides of all the hallways. 
• Flight Deck
  • For a FOD Walk Down, assemble the family at one end of the yard. Have them line up side by side to the full width of the yard and then have them walk slowly across the yard, heads down with no talking, and pick up every twig or pebble. The purpose of the walk down is to prevent the lawn mower from sucking something into the blades that will damage them.
  • Assemble your neighbors in the street with push brooms. Turn on all the garden hoses available and use extra strength dish detergent to wash the street. When half-done, open fire hydrants drench everyone.
  • ark all of your neighbors’ cars in a seemingly random order along the street. Change the order 3-4 times a day while other cars are speeding down the street.
    
• Flight Operations
  • For nights ops, wear earplugs. Have your neighbor stand across the street on the darkest of nights with a flashlight with a cone on the end so that he can signal you when the coast is clear of oncoming cars. When you're halfway across the street, have him change the signal as a car is ten feet from you and blaring its horn. Break into a sprint and trip over a manhole cover.
  • At random intervals during the day and night, have people drag chains on the roof, jump up and down, pound the roof with sledgehammers, and shake the house.
  • Stand in the street in dismal weather and direct traffic for 8 hours. Go onto your porch, eat a cold sandwich with warm milk, curl up on the floor for a short nap, and then go back to directing traffic.
• Head
  • Buy 50 cases of toilet paper, lock up all but two rolls, and then keep these two wet.
  • Divide bathroom shower with three partitions. Remove shower nozzles and replace them with kitchen sink dish sprayers, make it impossible to keep the water at a constant temperature.
  • Do not flush the toilet for five days to simulate the smell of 40 people using the same commode.
  • Get up late at night, walk carefully to the bathroom with only red nightlights to see by, groggily step into the bathroom and step into 4 inches of sewage that has overflowed onto the floor due to one of your children flushing a shirt that clogged the sewage system.
  • Lock the bathroom twice a day for a four-hour period.
  • On random days, either turn off the hot water or the cold water to the shower, and then on weekends inform your family that they used too much water during the week and as a result all showering is secured.
  • Pick random times during the day to lock the bathroom for cleaning.
  • Remove the glass bathroom sink and replace it with a scratched metal one.
  • Screw a framed copy of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) to the wall next to the commode so you always see it while using the commode.
  • When showering, randomly shut off either the hot or the cold water.
    
• Laundry
  • Gather all the dirty laundry and mix the clothing in a pile. Rip off every other button, pour bleach directly on the pile, stuff the washing machine to maximum capacity, DO NOT separate by colors. Partially dry items and redistribute the "clean" items in a random fashion among the group.
  • Have everyone in your family hang two pillowcases next to their beds with large clothespins and mark them "white" and "blue" for their dirty clothes. On laundry day, put the pillowcases into two separate trash bags and designate a junior family member to drag them to the laundry room.
  • Periodically wash the laundry with saltwater, bang zippers with a hammer, break buttons in half, and half dry the clothes. Have family put names on all clothing items and have then pick through a bag for their clean clothes.
• Liberty
  • Enter an exotic foreign port and be told that only officers will have permission to leave the ship.
  • On liberty in a white shirt and white pants (Dress Whites) eat out with friends at a local Italian restaurant;
  • Spend 2 weeks in the red-light districts of Europe, and call it "world travel."
  • Submit a special request chit (form) to your father-in-law, requesting permission to leave your house before 1500 (3 pm).  You must submit the request chit two days in advance. Instruct your father-in-law to hide for added realism. When you find him, listen to a lecture on "work ethics and responsibility."
• Lines
  • Stand in line at the local mini-mart to buy a lottery ticket when the jackpot is around $100 million.
  • Stand in line for an hour at ship store only to find the store is out of sodas and the chocolate bars have white spots due to their age.
    
• Lookout. When it rains. Get two empty coke bottles, tie them together, and hang them around your neck. Go outside and stand in the rain for four hours. From time to time, look through the coke bottles and observe the horizon and lightning.
• Maintenance
  • Every four hours, check the fluid level in your car's radiator. Check the tire pressure and replace air lost from excessive pressure checks. Be sure to place red tag on ignition stating "DANGER: DO NOT OPERATE" while you perform these checks.
  • Put on a clean white suit and then change the oil in your car.
  • Stand in the middle of a speeding subway car and try to do precise work using power equipment.
  • Study the owner's manual for all household appliances. Routinely take an appliance apart and put it back together.
  • Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawn mower. If you miss a week or use the wrong tool, hold a trial and restrict yourself to the house for a month. On six-month intervals, disassemble, inspect, and reassemble your car engine using only a 12" Crescent wrench and screwdriver.
  • With the help of your two six-year old nephews and a 1976 manual, replace the starter in your 1985 car, working only from the top. Have your father-in-law remind you every 3 minutes that you have 15 minutes to finish because the car is needed for the next trip.
• Make Way. When in a hurry, run through the hall yelling “Make Way!” and require everyone to stand against the wall as you run by.
• Medical. Instruct your doctor to dispense only "aspirin" (APC, all-purpose capsule) to you no matter what the ailment or complaint.
• Morning Quarters
  • Have your mother write down everything the family will be doing during the day, assemble your family in the back yard at 6:00 am and read the plans for day to you. Mill around for 15-20 minutes and then have your father reassemble the family and tell you the same thing again. 
  • Have your mother-in-law write down everything she's want done the following day, then have you stand in the back yard at 6am while she reads it to you.
  • Stand outside at attention at dawn and have the poorest reader you know read the morning paper out loud. Be sure to have him skip over anything pertinent.
    
• Passageways. Place metal barriers on the lower 9" of every door in your house so you bang your shins on them every time you to walk through the doors, and add eight handles to each door that must each be opened for the door to opened.
• Qualifications. Require your family to qualify to operate all the appliances in your home, such as Qualified Dishwasher Operator, Qualified Blender Technician, Qualified Toaster Operator, etc. Hold weekly one-hour classes after working hours on enlightening topics, such as "Dish Washing" or "Bed Making"
• Red Lights. After sundown, replace all light bulbs in the house with red ones.
• Reveille. Give the keys to your house to a neighbor and have him enter your bedroom every morning at 5:30 am, and blow a whistle, and yell through a bullhorn, "Reveille, reveille, all hands heave out and trice up. The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces."
• Security Alert. Enlist a team of paintball players to run through your dining room shouting "Security Alert!" At hearing this, everyone should drop to the floor or line up against the wall. For the best effect, do it during meals.
• Ship’s Bell
  • Install a large bell on the front porch and whenever a relative comes to visit, ring the bell 4 times and announce his arrival/departure over a megaphone.
  • Remove all clocks in the house and ring a bell at intervals to indicate the time.
    
• Shipboard
  • For an office, remove the contents of a walk-in closet and move three metal desks into it. At the nearest Salvation Army Thrift Store, salvage the oldest computer that you can find and set it on one of the desks. Take two of your "closest" friends into the closet and shut the door and try to write performance evaluations on the rest of your family while they stand outside the door yelling, "Hurry up."
  • At an amusement park, fill your stomach with coffee and ride a roller coaster non-stop.
  • Buy a dumpster, chip the paint off down to bare metal, paint it gray, and then live in it for six months while someone else keep chipping and painting the outside of it. 
  • Clean your house until there's absolutely not a speck of dust anywhere. Call on a stranger to inspect your house.
  • Cut the ends out of two juice cans, place them over your ears to distort the sound while watching TV.
  • Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep your driveway 3 times a day, whether they need it or not.
  • Have a neighbor needle gun (compressed air powered impact device for paint chipping) the aluminum siding on your house after you have gone to bed.
  •  Leave your lawnmower running in your living room for 24 hours a day for the proper noise level.
  • On the hottest most humid day of the year, close all the doors and windows in the house, and remove all fans for preventive maintenance and disassemble the air conditioner. On the coldest day of the year, disable your heating system for maintenance. All family members must wear sweaters, heavy coats, and gloves indoors to keep ice from forming on body parts. If going outdoors for any occasion everyone must appear uniform. If one person does not have the proper coat and gloves for the uniform, the person must go without.
  • Paint your house gray (exterior) include windows except for rooms you do not frequent, paint your car gray, paint your driveway a different shade of gray.
  •  Pump 10 inches of nasty, crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean up, and paint the basement "deck gray."
  • Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it to "high.”
  • Put the youngest most inexperienced adult in charge, salute him, call him sir, and laugh at him behind his back when he orders you do stupid things.
  • Remove all plants, pictures, and decorations. Paint everything gray, white, or the shade of hospital smocks.
  • Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it or not.
  • Repaint your entire house gray once a month.
  • Replace all wood objects with metal ones and paint them light gray.
  • Run all of the piping and wires inside your house on the outside of the walls.
  • Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, but only watch CNN and the Weather Channel.
  • The day before the quarterly Physical Readiness Test (PRT) get Yellow Fever and Typhoid shots. Hold a safety stand down immediately following PRT on the importance of hygiene, physical conditioning, and proper diet and nutrition and then hold a picnic featuring hot dogs and hamburgers (rollers and sliders) plus lots of greasy fries.
  • When watching TV, turn it off every 3 to 5 minutes saying that the satellite signal is lost.
    
• Special Sea Detail (when entering or leaving port).  Before leaving home and after arriving at home, have the entire family put on their best clothes and stand around the edge of the front porch at attention for an hour.
• Sweepers. Three times a day, sweep the entire house, including porches, decks, and driveways and empty trash cans in containers at the curb.
• UNREP (Underway Replenishment)
  • Strings ropes from your roof to your neighbor’s roof at 5:00 am, and then have all family members assemble on the roof wearing lifejackets and hard hats. Have then stand around until 8:00 am and then send everyone inside telling them it will be 2 hours until they will be needed and that they should eat breakfast. Wait until they just start to eat, and call them back to the roof. Transfer the contents of your neighbor's garage to your garage using the lines strung from roof to roof.
  • For refueling, before filling your car's gas tank hold a meeting six hours in advance of the station's opening. Assemble medical personnel, all your immediate relatives, safety observers and the fire department ready with fire hoses three hours before the station opens. Require everyone to line up on the sidewalk at parade rest as the clerk opens the station. Send a fuel sample to a testing lab before starting to fill up.
• Watch
  • For low visibility watch, while driving in foggy weather, instruct your children to turn around, look out the back window, and make reports on anything they see.
  • For bridge watch, get your neighbor to phone you at 11:30 pm, dress in the dark, hang binoculars around your neck, and stare at the backyard from your patio. Identify the whereabouts of all bats, crickets, moths, and stray dogs by sound and sight, keep a written record of everything you see, and choke down at least one cup of four-day old black coffee every thirty minutes. Anytime a critter enters the yard, call your wife on the cell phone to apprise her of its movements. On snowy or foggy nights, be sure to blow an air horn at regular intervals to warn the neighbors of your whereabouts.
  • For bridge watch, go to a local bridge and stare at the water for twelve straight hours.
  • For quaterdeck watch, in the middle of January, place a lectern at the end of your driveway. Have you family stand watches at the lectern, rotating at 4-hour intervals.
  • For quaterdeck watch, make all your children identify themselves every time they enter or leave the house, ask for permission to enter or leave, and then salute the flag on the back porch.
  • For sonar watch,Disconnect your TV cable box and stare to the static for six hours.  Report every 15 minutes to no one in particular, "Sonar holds no contacts."
  • Don your Sunday best and stand on your front porch for four hours.
  • In winter, invite all your neighbors to your house at midnight. Stand on your front pouch in a light jacket, a thin white hat, and a pair of thin gloves. Salute every person that arrives and grant them "permission to come aboard.” Have your wife relieve you at 4:00 am dressed in warm clothes. Spend next two hours trying to warm up and get some sleep before the next day’s work.
  • Stand by the phone from 12 A.M. to 4 A.M. with a logbook, fire bell, and intrusion alarm panel within reach. Mount a gauge on the wall to read your house's water pressure. Have your youngest child walk around with a tape measure to see if your basement is flooding. He/she must check it every hour and report back to you that all conditions are normal. With each report, phone a neighbor, and tell him all conditions are normal at your house and report the water pressure.
  • Walk around your car for four hours, check the tire pressure, oil level, and fuel level every 15 minutes, and keep an accurate log of the readings.
• Work Schedule. Periodically run your life on a "12 on, 12 off" routine. Work 12 hours at your normal day job and take care of your personal matters during the next 4 hours before 8 hours of sleep. During the next 12 hours off, have an 18 wheeler from a grocery distributor pull up in front of your house, gather all your neighbors, form a human chain from the truck down to your basement, pass all of the contents of the truck hand-to-hand down to the basement. Repeat the process the next 12 off shift, but this time unload a truckload of high explosives.