On using the bathroom

So on this ship right now there is only one women’s bathroom.  And it is conveniently located all the way aft; so far aft, in fact, that it might be easier just to stick my ass off the fantail and take a crap into Puget Sound.

When you said you wanted me to start blogging again, you didn’t see that one coming, did you?

So there’s that one bathroom - head, now that I’m in the real Navy - but I’ll call it a bathroom for civilian’s sake.  To go to that one bathroom, one must don one’s safety helmet and goggles and make one’s way down through the narrow hallway - passageway - through the gaggle of people waiting for medical; past the next gaggle of people waiting for new ID cards because you now have to use (and forget) your ID card to get on your computer; duck the hanging pipes and tubes and vents and anything else they can dangle above your head, only to inevitably knock your head as soon as you straighten your neck and give yourself whiplash; through the passageway where there are things sticking out of the walls just waiting to jab you in the hip when you bounce against it trying to avoid a head-on collision with a contractor pushing a cart of god-knows-what; over the “knee knockers” (raised doorways for flooding protection) where you can kiss your shoe shine goodbye; through the stinky sleeping area; and then you get all the way to the door in front of the bathroom only to find that the doorway has been taped off so they can put down a new floor in the 4 foot by 5 foot space, the one I could probably step across if given the chance.

You following?

Of course, because of how far away the bathroom is, you really only use it when you really, really have to go, so by the time you’re there you’re dancing like MJ. 

So then you have to trace the route back through the stinky sleeping area, over the knee knockers, down the hallway with the now-may-as-well-be-deadly-spikes, ducking, craning, arching and bending so as not to knock your head, and then cut across to the other side of the ship where you get to a point where you can’t proceed because it’s got blue tile down, and that means that you, as a lowly E-6, do not have the privilege of walking through said blue tile area.

So you turn around, and go back again, and now you go up the “steps” (they call them ladders here, and they’re neither ladder-ly feeling nor stair-ly feeling but rather deathtrap-ly feeling) to the hangar bay where you’re less familiar with the exit points to go back down one deck to the deck the bathroom is on.  You proceed forward and get to the fantail where you dodge hanging wires, squeeze through scaffolding while at the same point stepping over giant piles of rope, more hanging pipes threatening to decapitate you, and now you get to guess how to get down?  Do you go through that door in the hopes that there’s a stairway behind it?  Do you go through that stairway that is painted too white, which only looks suspect, like a white van that says “FREE CANDY“?  Or do you go down the shabby ladder behind the pile of cables conveniently parked right in front of it?

Well, it wasn’t behind the door, I checked.  And even I don’t accept candy from strangers.  There, at the bottom of the 3rd ladder, was the lone women’s bathroom.  Perhaps this is how the fantail got nicknamed the Poop Deck.

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