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El Diablo Negro

This section is about boat life, the ups and downs.

UPS:

Get to go to places that I probably never would have seen.
Meet a variety of people.
Get paid decent after 5 years.
Given a large amount of responsibility at a young age.
Taught many valuable life lessons at a young age.

and the Downs:

Constantly fed bullshit (bad food and propaganda.)
Can go days weeks or months without seeing sunlight, and potentially die from someone else's mistake.
Live in an environment which has low oxygen levels. (the level is actually raised for FIELD DAY which is a 2- 10 hour cleaning session which to me seems a bit extreme as a type of manipulation or drugging for a zero tolerance organization)
Live in an environment where most people are generally unhappy and depressed.
Live in an environment where rank is frequently confused with intelligence.
Live in an environment where hypocrisy it all to visible and present, even at meals or in the bathroom.
If you are not on the in crowd then everyday you wake and sleep and wake (18 hour day) to people who hate you who pick on you because it is in fashion.
If you are not selfish many people will take advantage of you to where it affects all parts of your life.
If you are good then you get a larger workload with no compensation.
Given frequent inspections that we freely break rules to look good on to make up for low morale, further lowering morale. (the best example of this is that we have to stow for sea so that nothing will move on a large angle, unless we are about to do ORSE where we throw oily vacuum cleaners above peoples racks to give the false appearance of engine room cleanliness)
Use operatives that we do not follow as excuses to make life miserable ( can only go out to sea for 28 days a quarter so we have to drill every day as it would otherwise be valuable training time lost. somehow we still managed a 47 day underway prior to deployment).
Stripping and waxing non wax tiles to a high shine before and after each port is dumb. (if there is no wax because some ignorant ass hole ordered sealant on accident then someone has to lay the sealant down knowing that it will take close to an hour a square foot to clean off)
While at sea the base can tow your car into the ghetto so your stuff can get stolen at your expense, while you are left in puerto rico for a 3 day vacation with no clothes, food, or money because they offloaded your stuff with the seals .
People will make false documents and rip up their own evaluations of you to make an example out of you (for example my missing year of evaluations).
People are generally not that bright (that is the only logical reason that i could have gotten the highest score achievable on my ASVAB even though I am dumb. I think they should apply a cap on test scores to make smart people unavailable to all programs for fleet wide uniformity).
30 minute walk to the boat everyday because due to security concerns parking remotely close to the boat is reserved for people of high rank.
As a nuc you are held to a higher standard than officers (who are infallible) and the coners (who are expected to be unintelligent.)
Over reactive not proactive.
~~Can be forced to take vaccinations that are known to cause cancer.~~ Some girl named Becky who has a husband on the USS Dallas (good deal for him - great boat...) said she did research at Carnegie Mellon University and knows for a fact that the statement is untrue. What is absurd is that anyone can think that their research was so far spreading and the accurates were so conclusive that they could make the statement that the above is false. To appease her I lined it out though.
Custodial arts is the foundation of most enlisted positions, clean monkey clean.

Nuclear: after 3 years the job is the same until you quit, and you CAN NOT change jobs no matter how horribly wrong your placement is, unless you are deemed mentally unstable. in this scenario you can receive psychotropic drugs and be put in charge of the restricted people. At this point you are told to treat the restricted personnel like shit even though you are psychologically unable to. After a few months you can be removed from that role due to poor performance. This was true and seen by my own eyes and to think somewhere there is a resource management department in this organization
If feeling dead and tell you shipmates you have lost all hope in humanity, they offer assistance by telling you to shut your fucking mouth and grow up.
Get talked to like a 3 year old when someone else messes up (praise in private, punish all the cock suckers.)
Submariners: have to share a rack no matter how unsanitary your shipmates are.
Submariners: can run a loud vacuum for 3 hours straight when we are not allowed to exorcize because it would be too loud.
Submariners: even though you eat the same food as the captain that still does not prevent them for substituting pero (dog) for your cheeseburger that was bought in Spain.
military hypocrisy

Specifically my boat. My first captain was arrogant and he let you know you were a stepping stone in his career. This may sound bad, but it wasn't. I do not like to praise military members, but I am forced to say he was one of the best in the world. My first XO was a great comedian who always liked to have a good time. He rarely if ever talked down to people. My ships engineer was overly anal which made drills a nightmare, which sounds bad but wasn't. Any time we had an inspection we did awesome because we were so used to doing things right and being under heavy stress. My senior enlisted advisor was a drunk and an idiot who nobody liked, but he was soon replaced. His relief was very much on the shady side, but it was obvious enough to me that it never really bothered me. My division officer was the most arrogant man I have ever met, and he was very on and off, but he came to like me so our relationship was good. The nuclear enlisted leader was probably the best leader I have ever seen. Even though I did not like much of what I was doing and did not fuse well with the lifestyle, he let me know that he was on my side. He made me feel good when I would wax the floor or bruise up my body cleaning the boat even though I did not like it. Against the advice of everyone else, he did not make me work extra hours because of my attitude. One time when the Engineer said something horrible to me, the senior enlisted nuk made the Eng (his boss) apologize to me in front of his face. With all of that said one might ask some questions. Why would I want to do drugs? Why would I break the rules?

The answer is simple. I have always been somewhat depressed and there was a serious lack of stimulants on the boat. I felt I had to make up for life lost while underway. Things come in cycles too. If all of the people above were pretty good, imagine what their replacements were like. The new CO is not respected by his piers or supervisor and is not intelligent on any plane. The XO is still actually pretty decent (and I can't explain this one.) The senior enlisted advisor is an overweight, turkey necked moron. The senior enlisted nuc is very inconsistent, actually almost as if he goes through PMS. I never spoke much of my direct supervisors, because they never were good. I gave them a lot of grief because they were my interface with a system I felt was eating me. Even when I told them of my problems they ignored me because I was too productive of a worker to lose. One of my collateral duties was gauge calibration. It sounds and is easy, but I almost went to captains mast for not calibrating a gauge that was taken off the boat as radioactive material before I ever got there.

Service, service, service. Those who directly affect what you eat or get paid do not care if they make mistakes. A think there is a competition to show who can have less pride in their work. Over half of the meals are garbage, many of which are cold partially because the cooks eat first. When I moved out of the barracks I was supposed to be getting money to pay rent. Only after 3 missed pay periods and me doing the job of the yeomen myself did I start to receive the money I was owed. Someone who graded my advancement exam did it on the wrong key, then removed other points, and it took another cycle to undo their errors.

I know I do not like the winter so I did not want to go where it is cold. Of course the navy (caring about its people) sent me to a boat out of groton, ct. Every summer I was on the boat they found a way to steal it from me so it felt like I was serving a 3 year winter. The most wonderful part about me going to THE BIG D (el diablo negro) is the series of events that lead me there. While my class graduated my detailer was on leave. Another guy stepped in and did his job for him. He sent me and another kid (in alphabetical order) to the same boat in the same division at the same time. He looked up what boat did not have a chief and sent us there so he could load the division up with junior personnel so no leaders would be sent there. He then wrote himself orders to that boat after making a deal with the detailer not to send a chief there, so he could make rank. He then was dumb enough to bitch and tell this story to us when they sent a chief. When I told him that was not a cool move he stated that I was new and just out of school so I didn't matter. I am not going to say that is closed minded or selfish because that would be redundant.