Personal Submarine Simulator 2.5

| August 12, 2018

Before you spend 2 billion on a submarine, you may want to complete some sea trials in your home first. For those who are brave enough, here are a few state-of-the art suggestions to simulate submarine life in the comfort of your home:

 

• Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Two to three hours after you fall asleep, have your spouse whip open the curtain, shine a $200 flashlight in your eyes, and mumble “Sorry, wrong rack”.
• Repeat back everything anyone says to you.
• Spend as much time as possible indoors and avoid sunlight. Only view the world through the peephole on your front door.
• Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. Shower once a week. Use no more than two gallons of water per shower.
• Buy a trash compactor and use it once a week. Store garbage in the other side of your bathtub.
• Sit in your car for six hours a day with your hands on the wheel and the motor running, but don’t go anywhere. Install 200 extra oil temperature gauges. Take logs on all gauges and indicators every 30 minutes.
• Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it to “High”.
• Watch only unknown movies with no major stars on TV and only at night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, and then watch a different one.
• Don’t do your wash at home. Pick the most crowded laundromat you can find.
• (Optional for Engineering Department): Leave a lawnmower running in your living room six hours a day for proper noise level.
•Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
•Take hourly readings on your electric and water meters.
•Invite guests, but don’t have enough food for them.
•Buy a broken exercise bicycle and strap it down to the floor in your kitchen.
•Eat only food that you get out of a can or have to add water to.
•Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (Optional- cold beans and weenies, canned ravioli or soup).
•Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator.
•Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get dressed as fast as you can, then run to your kitchen with the garden hose while wearing a scuba mask.
•Once a month take every major appliance completely apart and then put them back together. Ensure you have parts left over.
•Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for 5 or 6 hours before drinking. Never wash any coffee cups.
•Store your eggs in your garage for two months and then scramble a dozen each morning.
•Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
•Check your refrigerator compressor for “sound shorts”.
•Put a complicated lock on your basement door and wear the key on a lanyard around your neck.
•Lockwire the lugnuts on your car.
•When making cakes, prop up one side of the pan while it is baking. Then spread icing really thick on one side to level off the top.
•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 family for not having the place “stowed for sea”.
•Put on the headphones from your stereo (don’t plug them in). Go and stand in front of your stove. Say (to nobody in particular) “Stove manned and ready”. Stand there for 3 or 4 hours. Say (once again to nobody in particular) “Stove secured”. Roll up the headphone cord and put them away.
•Tag out the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, transmission and cigarette lighter when you change the oil in your car.
•Use Kool-aid on all your breakfast cereals for 2 months.
•Fill laundry baskets 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.
•Buy bunk beds (3 high type) and convert the narrowest hallway in your home into a bedroom.
•Knock a glass of water out of someone’s hand and yell ‘SPILL’. Shout at them the entire time they clean it up, tell them how worthless they are, then do it again. Once they have cleaned it up, make them read canister vacuum reviews out loud, this builds character.
•Request ‘permission to enter’ whenever you go into the kitchen.
•Buy all food in cases and line the floor with them.
•Replace all doorways with windows so that you have to step up AND duck to go through them.
•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.
•Paint the windshield of your car black. Make a family member stand up through the sunroof shouting directions at you on where to drive.
•Start every story with “This is no-shit“.
•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.
•Go to the market and buy 100 quarts of milk. Pour them into a large white trash bag and secure. Put the bag into the refrigerator and rename it “The Cow”.
•Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered to your garage and wait two weeks before eating them.
•Prepare all meals blindfolded using all the spices you can grope for, or none at all. Remove the blindfold and eat everything in three minutes.
•Periodically, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting “fire, fire, fire” and then restore power.
•Remove all plants, pictures and decorations.
•Paint everything gray, white, or “sea foam” green.
•Buy 50 cases of toilet paper and lock up all but two rolls. Ensure one of these two rolls is wet at all times.
•Make sure every water valve in your home has two backups in line which must all be operated to obtain water.
•Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it or not.
•All communications with outside family and friends is limited to 40 characters or less. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world.
•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.
•Mount as many sharp-cornered lockers as you can in all the most traveled halls of your house. Leave almost no room to squeeze by.

 

*The simulator is open-source and may be modified. Feel free to add more suggestions to make the Personal Submarine Simulator 2.5 more realistic.

Category: Satire

47 Comments
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5th/77thFA

And some folks wondered why I joined the Army Artillery.

FuzeVT

True enough! Lawton may suck, but you only have to be there for a few months!

AW1Ed

I wonder how many folks know what “sound shorts” are.

*grin*

100E

Help me out… I haven’t a clue what “sound shorts” are.
I loved the list.

AW1Ed

Anything that is a potential noise source, say a generator or even an air conditioning unit must be isolated from direct contact with the sub’s hull. If not, a “sound short” can exist, which will transmit unwanted noise into the water. This reduces the sub’s stealth, and makes counter-detection easier for guys like me.

100E

Thank you. I now know something I didn’t when I woke up this morning.

Jorge

You laugh, but this is all true, lol.

Jorge

Ex-Garbage Gun Shooter

What Jorge said…

David

Reminds me of the country boy who first declined submarines and then Airborne: “Let me put it to ya like this. I don’t want to end up no higher’n corn, or lower’n potatoes.”

OldManchu

And I thought being a grunt was tough! That was awesome ex-OS2. Quite a list there.

Roh-Dog

From what I heard: make sure the person you share a bed with has left a still hot load on the top cover and/or rubbed on and hanging off of the upper rack.
Once a week go to the basement to vacuum it after you roll in diesel and hydro, replace a $5 part that if the designers spent $20 it would last forever.
I’ve also heard ‘torpedo tube maintenance’ is a thing, inspecting the sides for burrs for 8 hours when you wise off to a PO.
Y’all submariners are nuts! At least as Infantry I could hide from a bullet, y’all can’t dodge a hull failure. Jus’sayin.

Claw

And to think I have a son who spent 26 years doing all of that.

Ex-PH2

Thanks, but I’ll stick to shore duty. 🙂

Doc Savage

Um…”NO”….I’m tall, claustrophobic, anti social, and a real bastard in the morning even after coffee.

The submariners would either evacuate or kill me in my sleep.

The Other Whitey

I have an uncle who spent the mid-70s on a sub, in his own words, listening for godless commie bastards lurking in the depths. He’s 6’7”, and almost as broad as he is tall. When I asked why somebody of his stature would volunteer for submarines, he said, “The sleeping arrangements sucked, but I liked my job!”

Jeff LPH 3, 63-66

A few years ago I got a few pages of the simulate shipboard life at home and sent them out to the OKIE 3 Shipmates that I keep in contact with. Lots of laughs.

Skidmark

LMAO! That took alot of imagination, awesome funny! My dad served in the Navy on a ship. My 2nd Cousin is a genius type guy that worked as a Contractor on Nuclear Submarines. A number of yrs ago, probably 15 or so, he somehow got clearance to give my parents & Aunt/Uncle a tour of the sub. Needless to say, they were impressed beyond belief & they laughed more about my dad’s 6′ 3″ body banging it’s way through it like a Manatee through a straw.
I like to call them Steel Tubes of Death. Gotta give props to any man or woman that serves on a Sub., superhuman people to me. Then add SEALs and their ways on & off of them and those heroes are supernatural beasts worthy of praise just under God. God Bles the US!

George V

Psalm 107, 23-24
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

They that go UNDER the sea in ships… now that’s a very different matter in what they see.

Sparks

I have had the best laughs I have enjoyed in a long time! Thank you ex-OS2 very much. Gives me a humorous though real life perspective of serving on a sub. You guys in the sub service have all my respect. The movies show hugs spacious places on the sub, but, no one lives in them. I stand amazed and in awe. I am still laughing.

Sparks

That should read “huge spacious places”. Sorry

NHSparky

Make sure you call your kids, “Nub” or “nonqual”. Give them qual cards on location of all outlets, etc. Call them dink pieces of shit if they don’t learn fast enough.

Jorge

LOL. That there is funny…

NHSparky

Have your wife keep everybody up 20 hours a day cleaning and drilling.

Keep telling each other, “It gets better after ORSE.” Then laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

RM3(SS)

ORSE=
Shit the nukes gotta do while us coners nap. 🙂

Wireman611

And yet it never does because the next ORSE is only a few months away.

BigJohn

LIKE

26Limabeans

That was a fun read but some of those things I already do. Scary.

RCAF-CHAIRBORNE

They left out: Infest your sleeping quarters with crab lice periodically to simulate port visits

MustangCryppie

LMAO. A way oldie, buy way goodie classic. I have my paper, wrinkled version from 1980 squirreled away somewhere.

Roh-Dog

G.U.A.M. & pink lipped tuna.
Maybe subies aren’t that strange after all.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://m.facebook.com/notes/randy-pace/submarine-slang-terms-and-phrases/10151136788588486/

A Proud Infidel®™️

I’m a-gonna steal a few of those!

AW1Ed

Simulate low level ASW flight by sitting sideways in the back of an old station wagon, all windows up, have the wife drive erratically down a bumpy dirt road with the heat on max, while a deranged person you picked up periodically shoots a starting gun inside to generate the necessary level of cordite smoke.

Sound about right, AW1 Tim?
*grin*

100E

As a pilot, I’ve been told by submariners:

“There are no dead submarines in the sky, but there are a lot of dead aircraft at the bottom of the oceans”.

AW1Ed

As Naval Aircrew in the business of Antisubmarine Warfare, my reply to that old trope has always been, “There are indeed more planes in the sea than subs in the sky. What goes up, must come down.

What goes down, however, doesn’t necessarily have to come back up again.”

NHSparky

Load food on one can or box at a time. Make sure it is unidentifiable (to borrow from George Carlin, “Could be meat, could be cake!”)

Make sure all meat frozen since 1970 and labeled as unfit for human consumption.

Have crew give it cute and clever names, such as, baboon’s ass, plastic cow, bug juice, horsecock, cat turds, rabbit turds with baby dicks, pillows of death, triangle fish, DBVC, elephant scabs, pus rockets, fried hamster, trail markers, cake and cock (and there ain’t no cake!)

Among other things.

RM3(SS)

You just gave the midrats meal list from my last Westpac! Now I’m hungry for some stickybuns and bug juice.

Paul

I’m sure glad I spent all my Navy time on an ASW carrier. Better to be on top looking than underneath being looked for!

OAE CPO USN Ret

I went aboard a Fast Attack for a tech assist while it was in port once.

ONCE.

I don’t know how you yahoo’s do it. I’ll stick to the surface Navy thank you very much.

PLASTIC DUCK

At least your best kit can’t go “out da window” on inspections……

A Proud Infidel®™️

They say that any boat can go underwater once but only a few can come back up!

Martinjmpr

I asked a rigger once if you could airdrop a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

His response: You can drop anything ONCE. 😉

Veritas Omnia Vincit

I had an opportunity to go Navy and be in the Submarine service, this simulator description only reinforces my opinion that infantry was a far better choice…the conditions in the infantry aren’t all that awesome but you can alway see the sky and you get plenty of good, clean, outdoor living.

Martinjmpr

As an Army guy, I’ve spent months sleeping in a cot with a generator running 24/7 just a few feet away but that still sounds like paradise compared to being on a ship.

I can understand why people might ENLIST in the Navy, I just can’t understand why anybody would RE-Enlist.

Claw

Shower (must be nice) once a week.

Use no more than two gallons of water (which you carry on your ruck)(sounds like two months worth of canteen cup whore’s baths to me) and you don’t even have to be Infantry to do that./smile

If there’s one thing you learn in the Army about field hygiene, it’s to wash your face before your ass.

Wireman611

When coming back from the grocery store, 3/4 of all coffee, candy and hot chocolate gets diverted to the space designated as engineering.

bullnav

I have seen that list, in various incarnations, for the last 25 years. It is ridiculously funny, but it hits the nail on the head. That being said, I am happy I am a Submariner. Remember–there are two kinds of ships: submarines and targets.

Peter the Bubblehead

This list is ‘Peter the Bubblehead’ approved.