I could write a book about all the shit that I went through but it would be boring as hell. They treated us like complete shit. We worked ungodly hours and would go days with minimal sleep. My boss made a comment a few weeks ago about how I never complain about anything job related and I said yeah, I spent 6 years of my life being treated like absolute shit, so this is a breeze.
I'm sure most of you will find this hard to believe, but I got in trouble a lot for being a smart ass. There were two groups of people on the sub. "Nukes" who ran the power plant and engine room, and "coners" (pronounced like ice cream cone) who did everything at the front of the boat (the cone). Nukes got an extra $100 a month. When we were in the shipyard and doing nuke plant testing the nukes worked 7 days a week, 13-16 hours a day for 8 weeks strait. We did 5 rounds of this. Coners were working about 20 hours a week, coming in at 8am and leaving by noon most days. I made around $1000 a month, and averaged below $2/hour many months.
We were sitting around bitching about it in the electrician shop one day and the XO walks by and interjects "But you are paid extra for that". I let out a big exagerated "pssssssshhhhhhhhh" and he goes balistic and starts yelling at me. I tell him I'm making about $2/hour and working around 400 hours a month compared to the coners 80 hours and the $100 is not worth the 300 hours. I tell him he can shove the $100 up his ass and send me to a surface ship to be a regular electrician. He finally realizes I'm not going to take any shit from him and he scurries off. He wants to send me to captains mast for insubordination and the CO tells him to fuck off.
A few weeks later the boats pick up truck goes missing. It was about 10am and we had just come off a 6pm-6am shift and were about to leave when he declares no one can leave till we find the pickup. There is no way in fuck I'm going to walk around the shipyard looking for a pickup when I can barely stay awake so we just sit in our office and dick off. I tell one of the guys to get a small carton of milk from the vending machine, and we cut a picture of a very similar truck from an auto trader we had laying around and taped the picture of the truck on top of the "Have you seen me" kid on the side of the milk carton and put it in his inbox outside his office. He came out and saw it and went crazy, yelling at everyone to find out who did it. Finally a wise old senior chief tells him it was obviously the nukes because it was smart and funny, and he should learn to laugh about shit like that instead of being a real life Frank Burns.
Other than the day I got out the day that cock munch left our boat was my favorite day in the navy
I was the top ranked E5 on our boat, but also the only E5 who hadn't reenlisted. They constantly begged for me to reenlist but I kept telling them to fuck off. At that time the guys who ran the diesel generators at the white house were navy nuke electricians. It was a very hard job to get as they only took the best, but it was a cushy gig with a lot of extra pay. So I told them I'd reenlist if I got to go there for my shore duty. So the Chief of the boat and the CO make all kinds of phone calls and pull in all kinds of favors and get me the billet. They present me with the paperwork and I tell my chief nah, I'm getting out. He laughed about it and then went and told the CO. We were in the shipyard on a barge at the time and we were on the bottom deck and the CO was on the 3rd deck. You could hear him yelling at my chief from our office 3 decks away. I was not very popular on the boat after that but was getting out in a month so I didn't give a fuck.