# Life in the Navy



## Qwack (May 25, 2002)

Anybody who has ever wondered what life in the Navy is like needs to read the below. It brought back many funny memories from my brief time with the sailors.

Semper fi

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray and live in it for 6 months straight.

2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house on the outside of the walls.

3. Pump 10 inches of nasty, crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean up, and paint basement "deck gray".

4. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $10 per beer until you're hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold.

5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawnmower.

6. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays turn your water temperature up to 200 degrees, then on Tuesday and Thursday turn it down to 10 degrees. On Saturdays and Sundays declare to your entire family that they used too much water during the week, so all showering is secured.

7. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling.

8. Have your next door neighbor come over each day at 5am, and blow a whistle so loud that Helen Keller could hear it and shout "Reveille, Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up".

9. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she's going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in the back yard at 6am and read it to you.

10. Eat the raunchiest Mexican food you can find for three days straight, then lock yourself out of bathroom for 12 hours, and hang a sign on the door that reads "Secured-contact OA division at X3053".

11. Submit a request form to your father-in-law, asking if it's OK for you to leave your house before 3pm.

12. Invite 200 of your not-so-closest friends to come over, then board up all the windows and doors to your house for 6 months. After the 6 months is up, take down the boards, wave at your friends and family through the front window of your home.you can't leave until the next day because you have duty.

13. Shower with above-mentioned friends.

14. Make your family qualify to operate all the appliances in your home (i.e. Dishwasher Operator, Blender technician, etc.).

15. Walk around your car for 4 hours checking the tire pressure every 15 minutes.

16. Sit in your car and 1et it run for 4 hours before going anywhere. This is to ensure that your engine is properly "lighted off".

17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house, and sweep your driveway 3 times a day, whether they need it or not. (Now sweepers, start your brooms, sweepdown fore and aft, empty all ****cans over fantail)

18. Repaint your entire house once a month.

19. Cook all of your food blindfolded, groping for any spice and seasoning you can get your hands on.

20. Use eighteen scoops of budget coffee grounds per pot, and allow each pot to sit 5 hours before drinking.

21. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item.

22. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, but only watch CNN and the Weather Channel.

23. Avoid watching TV with the exception of movies that are played in the middle of the night. Have the family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.

24. Have your 5-year-old cousin give you a haircut with sheep shears.

25. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.

26. Spend 2 weeks in the red-light districts of Europe, and call it "world travel".

27. Attempt to spend 5 years working at McDonalds, and NOT get promoted.

28. Ensure that any promotions you do get are from stepping on the dead bodies of your co-workers.

29. Nail gun the aluminum siding on your house after your neighbors have gone to bed.

30. When your children are in bed, 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. ("General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations")

31. Make your family menu a week ahead of time and do so without checking the pantry and refrigerator.

32. 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 don't pay attention to the menu any more so they just ask for hot dogs.

33. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan while it is in the oven. Spread icing on real thick to level it off.

34. In the middle of January, place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4-hour intervals.

35. Lock yourself and your family in your house for 6 weeks. Then tell them that at the end of the 6th week You're going to take them to Disneyland for "weekend liberty". When the end of the 6th week rolls around, inform them that Disneyland has been cance1ed due the fact that they need to get ready for engineering-certification, and that it will be another week before they can leave the house.

36. In your grim, gray dumpster (refer to #1), with 200 of your not-so-closest friends (cite para. 12) regardless of gender, suffer through PMS!

37. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep. She should then shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble "Sorry, wrong rack".

38. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub, move the showerhead to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you shut off the water while you soap down.

39. When there is a thunderstorm in your area, find a wobbly rocking chair and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. Make sure you have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket.

40. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.

41. For ex-engineering types: leave the lawn mower running in your living room eight hours a day.

42. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.

43. Once a week, blow compressed air up your chimney, making sure the wind carries the soot onto your neighbor's house. Ignore his complaints.

44. Every other month buy green or red marine primer and put it in a paint sprayer. Spray it over the roof of your house onto your neighbor's car. Ignore his complaints.

45. Lock wire the lug nuts on your car.

46. Buy a trash compactor, but use it only once a week. Store the garbage on the other side of your bathtub.

47. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread.

48. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night, jump up and get dressed as fast as you can making sure you button up the top button on your shirt, stuff your pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose.

49. Once a month, take every major appliance apart and put them back together again.

50. Install a fluorescent lamp under the coffee table and then get under it and read books.

51. Raise the threshholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through one of them.

52. Every so often, throw the cat in the pool and shout "Man overboard, starboard side" Then run into the house and sweep all the pots and dishes off the counter. Yell at the wife and kids for not having the kitchen "stowed for sea."

53. Put on the headphones from your stereo set, but don't plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck with string. Go stand in front of your stove. Say to no one in particular "Stove manned and ready "Stand there for three or four hours. And again say to no one in particular "stove secured" Roll up headphones and paper cup and place them in a box.


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## USMC-RET (Aug 12, 2003)

Qwack,
Laughing my a$$ off. You just aren't right..but your right. Glad I was never a swabby, but did enough floats.

Still on for Oct?


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## stevepike (Sep 14, 2002)

:lol: 
That's great. USMC-RET West Pacs or Pumps?

USMC '89-'99


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## USMC-RET (Aug 12, 2003)

Steve
Pumps out of Lejuene, North Atlantics 
Semper Fi


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## Dick Monson (Aug 12, 2002)

US-Steve, RVN-'68-'70
Semper Fi to you too.


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## ducksndogs (Aug 12, 2003)

Good stuff. Lots of truth to that. Made me laugh too. USN '89 - '95. Wow, I must be the epitome of what you fellas dont like... ex-swabby, MN NR... well, at least we can agree to enjoy waterfowling.


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## Qwack (May 25, 2002)

ducks,

I don't think anybody here dislikes NRs in general. Not sure what the general feeling is towards squids though :lol:

Maybe you can explain a few things. Like what the heck does "thrice up" mean? (see #8 above). Even though it was about 15 years ago, that wake-up call is still embedded in my head, but I never did know what I was supposed to do when they said "thrice up".

And #17, wasn't the phrasing more like "sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms. Give the ship a good sweep from fore to aft" Was there more to that one?


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## ducksndogs (Aug 12, 2003)

Qwack - you hit em all perfectly. I had to reread a few times for more laughs. I dont know why we did the things we did. But damn we had clean ships. I can remember the Mar Det (notice I'm being nice and refraining from any use of of the words Jar and Head... whoops) had a sweet picture of 4 or 5 marines hoisting up a floor buffer as opposed to the flag hoist on Iwo Jima. It was great.


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## Qwack (May 25, 2002)

DnD,

I can't claim credit for this. I found it on another bulletin board. I think it was first posted on the USS Oxford website so you can't blame the jarheads for this one! I'm sure somewhere out there is one about life in the Marines, Army, and Air Force too.


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## USMC-RET (Aug 12, 2003)

Qwack,
No problem with the NR ( I R 1). But your right about the squids. :lol:

Course never took offense at being called a jarhead either.


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## ducksndogs (Aug 12, 2003)

I never took offense to squid or swabby or ice cream man or anything else thrown out either. We had a job to do and we did it. So whether jar head or squid, I have the utmost respect for those that have served honorably.

GO NAVY, BEAT ARMY!


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