Um.. no.. If someone went more than a DAY without a shower we would have 'helped' him get clean. There is enough stink on a boat without someone intentionally being a dick.
You ALWAYS get a shower after EVERY watch unless something bad happens. You never knew when it was going to be your last for a while. Taking a shower filles the san tanks with water. When they are full you have to pump (or blow) them over the side. This make NOISE. Noise is BAD. If you get into a situation when you can't afford to make noise you secure the showers fairly soon.
Sea Story time:
We had ONCE, the failure of both the rainmaker and the baby rainmaker. These are the primary distilling plant and its much smaller emergency backup.
The main plant broke on the back watch on a sunday and would not clear the salinity alarms. We fired up baby and it would not clear ITS salinity alarms either.
To those other bubbleheads reading this, yes, we performed the sacred rites, chicken bones and all. We made the proscribed sacrifices. The naked rain dance failed to correct the issue as well. I have a photo SOMEWHERE around here of 15 or so guys dancing naked around the the evap. It is funny as hell as we did not know our chief had a sense of humor and he took the photo and had a bajillion copies made.
Anyway, we could not make ANY fresh water and that is a bad thing. Drinking water you can do without for a bit, but the PLANT had to have a supply if we were going to keep steaming.
I was pulled off the watchbill monday morning with 4 others with the expressed duty to get ONE of them running. Yep, they dropped the whole MM side of the engineroom to port/starboard watches to get this fixed. We decided to dismantle and rebuild BOTH of them at the same time. Ambitious guys huh??
You have to understand, we were UNDERWAY at the time. We could not just 'pull in' and get it fixed and we were a bit distant from the nearest support facility. These are industrial grade pieces of hardware. Fixing them in port is a pain. Doing it underway was even worse.
The whole crew was put on no showers, double and triple up before a flush (I know.. EWWWW), watch what you drink, etc etc etc.
You have NEVER heard such a whine from the sonar boys. They would come back and tell us to do our jobs so they could take a shower.
Anyway, come FRIDAY morning, baby clears it salinity alarm and we can put water forward to the potable water tanks. About 2 hours after that the big guy clears its alarms and we are back in biz. High fives all around. We were the freaking GODS and we knew it. Nothing could touch us after we got BOTH of them fixed.
About 20 minutes later they announce the weekly friday Field Day.
Up till that point I had not realized that I had been awake and functioning since I came on watch monday morning for the balls watch (midnight on monday morning when the logs say 00:00). It was now 08:00 friday morning and we were expected to start cleaning up the engineroom. Ahh.. the stamina of youth. Except for the coffee and the occasional sandwiches we had worked non-stop on this.
Anyway, we get it running and we were NOT allowed to take a shower nor get to sleep. That is till doc found out that we had been going non-stop. He put his foot down and we got a hot hollywood and unlimited rack time till we woke up on our own.
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