My Buddy John

One of the most demoralizing, yet ever-so-typical things I was forced to do as a nub was clean the officers' head. Nothing clues you in to the fact that two years of training doesn't mean jack like having savor someone else's stink while you polish a shitter. Yeah, I know, -someone- has to do it, and that someone's usually a nub... but when I was that nub, I vowed revenge.

And it's not like the officers on my first boat were any more clean than us blueshirt scum - their head was actually kinda nasty compared to ours, even back when you could smoke in the head. That's probably because we cleaned up after ourselves when we were done using it, whereas the zeroes didn't.

Anyhow, payback was actually pretty easy; I just stuck an empty poopy suit in the stall after I got done cleaning it, along with an old pair of topsiders I found in berthing. You see, I'd heard one of the JO's whining in the Weirdroom that the crapper was occupied, and realized that they would rather go somewhere else (or hold it) than say anything. Even if the stall was occupied all watch, none of them were going to investigate further.

I shoved a few rolls of TP down the legs, and voila! One occupied shitter. The JO's tended to just use the small head down by AMR if theirs was busy, and apparently none of them had the sack to knock on the stall door and find out what was taking so long.

And they HATED using sharing a head with us. Not as much as sharing 9-man, but close.

I thought it might work for a few hours or so, but no one caught on for about two days. What finally happened was "John" (as we affectionately dubbed him) fell apart when we came up to PD in sea state 3. Even then I'm guessing the zero that found the mess wasn't exactly sure what was going on - everything was bouncing around, so it may have looked like someone just left their clothes in the head, and some TP fell out of the rack. But pretty much all the blueshirts knew by then what was going on, so half of the time the head by AMR was secured for some reason or another. I'm guessing one or two JO's ended up pissing in a funnel back aft, just like the rest of us.