Afishionados,

I saw this image, along with its headline, over at MSNBC.com.

I’m not sure what kind of probe the Dems are using, but I know that Gonzales has been talking out of his ass since this whole thing started.

Afishionados,

I’ll be leaving for yet another fabulous fast cruise tomorrow morning, so the Fish will most likely be quiet once again. Expect regular updates to recommence sometime around May 1st.

In all sincerity, thanks for hanging in there and still visiting despite the lack of regular content. I suggest you write your congressman and hire me for a better job than the one I am currently doing.

Afishionados,

Remember the Navy Cash Card program? Well, it’s up and running onboard the Lincoln, now. The card slots on the vending machines have LCD screens that scroll and flash little messages across them.

One of the vending machines sells cigarettes. I had to look twice at the machine’s scrolling LCD panel, because I wasn’t sure that I was reading it correctly. Upon closer examination, it turns out I had.

The LCD message was simple: “Hungry?”

Afishionados,

These next few weeks may be quiet around here for a while. The powers that be onboard the Lincoln have decided that the Reactor Department needs to be in a Port and Starboard duty section. What this means is that I have duty (i.e. a watch or some other “job”) every other day. But wait, there’s more! The even higher powers that be have determined that the Reactor Department also needs to do a “fast cruise”.

“What’s a fast cruise?”, I hear you asking.

A fast cruise is where the ship goes absolutely nowhere but you pretend that you are at sea. So I am stuck onboard the the world’s most evil and most hated ship until Friday or Saturday. Joy. I may get a half day off this weekend, but then this process starts all over again. There is no end in sight as to when this schedule is projected to end.

I better go. My cell is dark and the candle I made from my earwax and dental floss is just about burnt out. Gotta save some more for later this week.

Afishionados,

Today I had training on the Navy’s latest great idea: Making a cashless ship.

Instead of cash, the USS Abraham Lincoln will partake in the new Navy Cash Card program.

It works just like a credit card and has pretty much all the same features. Soon, it will be the only way to purchase items from the ship’s store and vending machines. I have my own apprehensions about the system, but we’ll see.

Anyhoo, the training was given by a young, skinny, personnelman who obviously didn’t prepare or rehearse his spiel whatsoever. Listening to him literally repeat himself drove me to the point of wanting to bitch slap him across the Puget Sound.

The biggest problem with the training was the fact that the new Navy Cash card consists of a “chip account” and a “strip account”. Essentially, the card has two sub-accounts independent of one another for purchases. The strip account can be used anyplace that takes Visa/Mastercard, whereas the chip account is what’s used in all the vending machines and the ship’s store.

I say this is a problem because “strip” and “chip” rhyme. Throw into the mix that I work on a “ship” and the personnelman repeated himself all too frequently and you get something kinda like this:

“Soon, we’re going to equip the ship with the new Navy Cash Card. The card is equipped with a chip account and a strip account. When we take our next trip on the ship, keep your card near your hip. To prevent losing it I recommend a clip. You can transfer funds from the chip to the strip for use off the ship. Or you can transfer funds from the strip to the chip, but only while onboard the ship.

If you get thirsty on the ship, just skip to the vending machines. If you insert your card into the machine and it doesn’t work, look for the chip. It’s likely you just inserted the card backwards and you need to give it a flip to slide in the chip. Once completed, grab your soda with a grip, hold it up to your lip, and take a sip.”

I swear the whole session sounded like it was given by Dr. Seuss.

Afishionados,

It’s been very, very windy here in the Seattle area these past few days. “Wind advisories” have been put into effect almost every day this week. These advisories seem to serve very little purpose other than to let people know that, “Hey, there’s wind today so go on about your business as usual, just be aware that it’s…windy. And although we, the weathermen, have issued these ‘advisories’, please be aware that we have no instructions on how to deal with this ‘wind’. Thank you.”

Unfortunately, the wind was simply too much to deal with for some people this morning. Second Class Petty Officers and above are authorized to ride a hypothetical (musn’t give away information to the terrorists) ferry that travels directly from the base in Everett to the base in Bremerton. That means never having to ride the infamous bus for Third Class Petty Officers and below.

That is, unless someone issues a wind advisory, in which case you get the day off. Yes, that’s right, moments after undocking and venturing forth through the Puget Sound, the ferries had to turn around and call it a day. The seas were too…um…wavy for the United States Navy and their…ferries.

In all fairness, the ferries are civilian owned and operated and are simply contracted out by the Navy. But still, there is something ironic about the wind being too much for the self-proclaimed “world’s most powerful Navy”.

Afishionados,

When last I wrote about working for muppets, I failed to mention that there are actually two people [that like to believe that they are] in charge of me. Like Ernie, Bert also lacks a penis and is incapable of thinking for himself.

Bert and Ernie can’t do anything [correctly] without attempting to decipher hidden clues buried deep within the contents of Ernie’s clipboard. I watched them stare at it for over 40 minutes today, trying to figure out what to “do”. I’m pretty sure that the clipboard contains the answers to all life’s most important questions, such as “Who really killed Jean Benet Ramsey?”, “Where is Jimmy Hoffa buried?”, and “Where are the weapons of mass destruction hidden?”. I guarantee you that if you stare that clipboard long enough, the answers will present themselves.

Today was Sunday, which means all the officers and “important” people are at home and aren’t around to watch Bert and Ernie’s every move (Not that they really do anything anyway). Fire watches have to be scheduled 24 hours in advance, so there should be no secrets that come up from the shipyard workers when they want to weld something.

In my eyes, this means I should be able to “disappear” (i.e. take the 9:30 bus back home). After all, if there’s no work to be done, what’s the point in staying? Bert and Ernie disagree with me on this and instead force me to literally do nothing but sit and “guard” our beloved plywood cubicle of love in the hangar bay.

The level of stupidity in the Navy is really wearing on me, and I still have a long way to go. People are such assholes, especially when it comes to pointless shit. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to crack and bitch slap someone at some point.  Something has got to change, or I’m going to shoot myself in the face. Twice.

Afishionados,

My ship is now in dry dock, which means just what it sounds like. There’s no water beneath the carrier. For obvious reasons, the reactor isn’t really “up and running” so I’m of little use to my nuclear co-workers right now.

Because of this, I’ve been pawned off to a “fire watch” team. The schedule is great (aside from the bus ride¹) and the work is easy. My job is simple: I watch shipworkers weld and, in the extremely unlikely case that they set something on fire, my job is to extinguish it with my trusty CO2 pal. Keep in mind that they’re welding steel and that steel very rarely catches on fire. So, what I suppose I should say is that I watch people weld and nothing else.

My boss² is a fellow nuke and his personality is underwhelming to say the least. Aside from the fact that he wears glasses, he looks exactly like Ernie the Muppet from Sesame Street. I like to sing the much beloved “Rubber Ducky” song around him as often as possible which, deep in his heart, I know he loves (I can tell by the way he rolls his eyes and scowls that he thoroughly enjoys it as much as I do).

I’m not for sure what it is that Ernie does all day other than catch flies with his noticeable underbite and stare at his clipboard. The way the fire team works is I wait in a plywood cubicle with 50 or so other people until a shipworker needs someone to watch them weld. Because Ernie is in charge, he never actually “fire watches”. He just…reads his clipboard and…um…underbites things.

¹By boss I mean “one who believes I am away working because I am nowhere to be found”.

²I don’t know if Hell exists, but I do know that you have to take a bus to get there.

In boot camp I attended a class on terrorism and how to best “protect” yourself and avoide a terrorist attack. Some of the suggestions from the class instructor included the following:

1. Vary your schedule and do not take the same route to work every day.
2. Do not wear your uniform out in town or in public any more than is necessary.¹
3. Do not tell people that you are in the Navy.
4. Do not tell people where the ship is located.

Having said that:

1. I don’t really take a bus in the morning every day to work only to get back on the bus late in the afternoon to return home.
2. Not only do I not take a hypothetical bus ride every day, but there is absolutely no way I don’t really ride the bus on the exact same route every hypothetical day.
3. I am not in the Navy. Nor did I every hypothetically say that I was.
4. The big fucking hypothetical gray ship with the “72″ painted on it (which is also hypothetically illuminated at night) that you can hypothetically see from the public highway is not the USS Abraham Lincoln. You never saw it, and neither have I. What you really saw was swamp gas from a weather balloon that was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus.

If you’re a terrorist and you read this far, please forget everything at this point. Thank you!

¹It’s not permitted to board the hypothetical bus unless you are in uniform. But don’t let this fool you, as the big bus with all the uniformed personnel is not really full of uniformed personnel.

Afishionados,

Fellow sailors in the reactor department onboard CVN-72 have been asking me if I’m planning to reenlist this fall (I have the option at my two year point to do so). So, let’s take a look at some new evidence in the Case of Atlas Cerise vs. Reenlistment.

This morning, I was part of a working party group of people who were off to the other side of the water to another Naval base in Bremerton, WA. The bus was meant to arrive at 0700, take us directly to Bremerton, we’d move mattresses, then the bus would bring us back. We’d be finished by 1400 and we could have the rest of the day off.

The bus arrived at 0700. I got on. And waited until 8 fucking thirty to finally leave the base. Seamen Recruit Gomer Goddam Pile was our bus driver, and spent 30 minutes on the phone calling someone to find out how to get off the base. How to get off the base. My first instinct was to, oh, I dunno, go out the big fucking gate.

Finally, SR Pile gets us off the base. It takes almost two hours to drive to Bremerton because:

SR Pile does a fine job driving to Bremerton, and we arrive. And wait. For another hour. We don’t know why. Eventually, a truck full of mattresses from the carrier arrives and we need to offload the truck and get them into various racks inside the barracks. This is not a hard job to do and it takes less than an hour.

I’d like to pause here and describe the mattresses to you. The mattresses that the Navy utilizes onboard CVN-72 look like props from the movie SAW. I saw every possible form of stain known to mankind today. Cum stain, sweat stain, piss stain, puke stain… And those were just the first layer. I saw urine stains with rings. I could decipher the age of the mattress as though it were a tree trunk.

“Ah, yes, here’s a vintage piss stain back from ‘94. And if you look closely, you can see a cum stain from ‘97 that borders it. Yessiree, these are real treasures”

The female mattresses were even worse. Ladies, wear a fucking pad already.

Once the delightful task of unloading the mattresses was completed, everyone once again boarded the bus. And waited. For twenty minutes. Finally, SR Pile discovers his right foot and learns to push down on the accelerator.

If you’ve never been to Washington before, don’t bother coming. The Space Needle is not that cool and traffic is an absolute nightmare. What would be a 20 minute drive from Seattle to Everett is now an hour-and-a-half ordeal. By bus, it takes even longer. By Government bus, it takes the longest.

A couple years hours later the bus finally returns us to good ol’ Naval Station Everett. We arrived at 1400, just like we were promised 1530.

So, 7 hours of bus riding and 1 hour of work later, we return to the initial question of “Will I be reenlisting?”

The court finds in favor of ET3 Cerise. Judgement for the plaintiff in the amount of “Are you out of your fucking mind?”