In Honor of Racks

Ah, your rack. Even the beds in an RV look spacious in comparison, but there's no place you'd rather be after a 20-hour "normal" work day at sea. If you're lucky (or on a boomer) you may even get one all to yourself. And nothing puts you to sleep faster than rocking along when you're near the surface.

Every now and again the COB would go on a tear about making your rack when you weren't in it. This may make sense on a skimmer, where everyone is up all day and the lights are on in berthing, but the only time you could even tell whether a rack was made or not in a perpetually dark submarine bunk room was during drills and field day. I usually just brought a sleeping bag, which could be rolled up if necessary to give the impression I'd made my rack.

One time, this rack-making obsession got so bad they actually had someone inspecting berthing after every watch relief to make sure all the empty racks got made. In retaliation, several of us went out and bought kids' sheets - my own personal favorite was my Fraggle Rock set. I'm sure the sight of a bunkroom full of colorful cartoon characters set the COB's teeth on edge (made or not - and made was actually worse in this case, since you could see the cartoons better) but the CO had graciously allowed us to use whatever sheets we wanted when not in port.

So our sheets highlighted two things: One, the racks were so small that little kids' sheets fit them perfectly, and two, that they were treating us like kids. A few guys even got their wives to sew them custom matching curtains (or, at least they told us it was their wives who did the sewing... some of the ETs seemed to know an awful lot about sewing machines for a dude). The rack-making mania quietly faded away in a few weeks, though I kept using kid sheets the rest of the time I was there.

When I was on a fast boat, one COB we had was famous for shuffling the berthing bill on a regular basis. You almost never had the same rack for more than a month or two. These moves were seemingly random, until we electricians noticed that we almost always got a rack with a broken rack light... just as the A-gangers kept getting racks that had a broken post or hasp. And there was a lot of broken shit in berthing; it was such a low priority that even the Eng was okay with us blowing it off. But the COB knew we'd fix whatever was broken in racks we had to use, usually on our own time, so he just kept moving us as necessary 'til everything got fixed.