Posted: 7/5/2009 10:29:49 AM EDT
|
I saw one of these about the Navy – might have even been here. Thought I'd relive my 23 year Army career by penning a few rememberances. Feel free to add since I retired in 1999 and I'm sure some new things have cropped up! Most are original while some are from the "Navy" list but put into Army terms.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––- HOW TO SIMULATE LIFE IN THE ARMY •Tuck your pant legs into your socks. •Have your son’s best friend give you a haircut. Allow him to use only one hand. Pay him $8.00. •Walk your family to school and church. Make them walk in step. When they get out of step, call them “numb-nuts” and “maggot”. Chant irreverent poems. •Tie your shoelaces in square knots. Tuck the ends into your shoes. •Every three months, take your family camping for 30 days. Go to a very dusty place. Don’t shower. Change your underwear weekly. Change your clothes bi-weekly. When you come home, burn your clothes. •Wear a hat whenever you go outside. •Go to the Winn-Dixie. Show the girl at the Customer Service desk your library card or student body ID card before shopping. •At precisely 5:00 PM, stop your car in your lane of traffic, get out, face the center of town, place your hand over your heart for two minutes. Get back in your car and drive away. •Always wear a necklace under your clothing. •Every 90 days, serve only canned food, three meals a day, for two weeks. Eat it out of the can at room temperature. •When the lights go down at the movie theater, stand and place your right hand over your heart for two minutes. Sit down and enjoy the movie. •Buy a one thousand watt stereo system for each bedroom in your house. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, open the bedroom doors and windows, put a different CD in each system. Turn all the volume knobs to “10”. •Have your employer’s payroll department arrange to pay you only once a month, on the 30th. Spend 95% of your pay by the 7th. Borrow money from your friends on the 25th. •Place a card table inside your front door. Require one of your children to sit at the table with a sheet of paper. When your children’s friends come over to play, make them sign in and out. Make your child sit at the table all night. Make him go to school in the morning. •Buy matching outfits for your entire family. Make them wear the same outfit each day. •Put nothing in your pockets. •End every phone conversation by saying, “Out Here”, then hang up. •Injure a body part and go to the ER. Ask to be treated by the Dermatologist. If one is not available, ask for the Psychiatrist or Gynecologist. •When your family comes to the dinner table, have them sign a roster for their meals. •Post a menu for the week. Only serve three of the seven dinner meals posted. Serve ham slices to the last person to sit at the table. •Remove the knobs that control the air conditioning and heater in your car. Drive everywhere with all windows down. •Inventory your children’s toys each month. If any of the toys are broken or missing, purchase exact replacements and take the money out of their allowance. •When you finish a cigarette, flick the ash and remaining tobacco on the ground. Put the filter in your pocket. •Remove the lint screen from your clothes dryer. If your spouse replaces it, remove it again and throw it away. •Every six months, make your family do push-ups and sit-ups for two minutes, then run two miles. Weigh them, tell them they are overweight for their height. Serve KFC or pizza for dinner for the next month. •When you go on vacation from work, have the HR department deduct the weekends from your vacation days also. •Every morning at 0630, have your family stand in a line on the driveway, tell then what they are going to do for the day (even if it’s the same thing they do every day). Inspect a child, tell them they need a haircut and a shave. Make them report to you by 1700 to show you the haircut. •Replace each box of kleenex in your house with a role of toilet paper – "Army kleenex on a roll". •Every three years, on the child’s birthday, set each child down for an interview, tell them what a great job you think they have been doing and how important they are to the family. Get them to sign a document promising to stay with the family for another three years. Promise them an increase in their allowance, a room of their own, and better food. The day after their birthday, treat them just as you did before the interview. •Every year, send your boss a memo requesting to be transferred to Hawaii. •Go on vacation. Stay one day longer than you told your boss you would be gone. Do not call him and tell him you will be late. When you return, visit with him and tell him your car broke down or your flight was cancelled and you had to be rescheduled to a later one. Write out a check for two weeks wages and send it to payroll. •Remove the doors from the bathrooms in your house. •Make your children walk down the sides of the hallway, avoiding the centerline. •Throw out all your ink pens in your house, except the black ones. •Each night, make one of your children continually walk throughout your house with a large flashlight and wearing a football helmet, have them check to see that the windows and doors are secure, and ensure that the other children are not smoking in bed. •On the Fourth of July, have your family stand on your front lawn, in formation at parade rest. Dismiss them only after at least two members have fallen over with heat exhaustion. |
|
Make your child sit at the table all night. Make him go to school in the morning.
-And while he's sitting there all night, he might as well sweep, mop, and buff the floors. Don't bother stripping the 200 layers of wax off the floor, just add more and buff over it. -Hire local teenagers to get drunk on your lawn and leave beer cans and vomit piles on your front porch -Once a month, intentionally get food poisoning from your wifes cooking. Go to work anyway. -Break one or more bones in your body and go to the ER. Insist that they give you one day off of work and a bottle of motrin. |
|
For reference...
How to simulate life in the navy 1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray and live in it for 6 months straight. 2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house on the outside of the walls. 3. Pump 10 inches of nasty, crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean up, and paint the basement "deck gray." 4. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $10 per beer until you're hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold. 5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawnmower. 6. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays turn your water temperature up to 200 degrees, then on Tuesday and Thursday turn it down to 10 degrees. On Saturdays, and Sundays declare to your entire family that they used too much water during the week, so all showering is secured. 7. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling. 8. Have your next door neighbor come over each day at 5am, and blow a whistle so loud that Helen Keller could hear it and shout "Reveille, Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up". 9. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she's going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in the back yard at 6am and read it to you. 10. Eat the raunchiest Mexican food you can find for three days straight, then lock yourself out of the bathroom for 12 hours, and hang a sign On the door that reads "Secured-contact OA division at X-3053." 11. Submit a request form to your father-in-law, asking if it's OK for you to leave your house before 3pm. 12. Invite 200 of your not-so-closest friends to come over, then board up all the windows and doors to your house for 6 months. After the 6 months is up, take down the boards, wave at your friends and family through the front window of your home...you can't leave until the next day you have duty. 13. Shower with above-mentioned friends. 14. Make your family qualify to operate all the appliances in your home (i.e., Dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc). 15. Walk around your car for 4 hours checking the tire pressure every 15 minutes. 16. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere. This is to ensure your engine is properly "lighted off." 17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house, and sweep your driveway 3 times a day, whether they need it or not. (Now sweepers, start your brooms, clean sweep down fore and aft, empty all trashcans over the fantail) 18. Repaint your entire house once a month. 19. Cook all of your food blindfolded, groping for any spice and seasoning you can get your hands on. 20. Use eighteen scoops of budget coffee grounds per pot, and allow each pot to sit 5 hours before drinking. 21. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item. 22. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, but only watch CNN and the Weather Channel. 23. Avoid watching TV with the exception of movies which are played in the middle of the night. Have the family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one. 24. Have your 5-year-old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears. 25. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants. 26. Spend 2 weeks in the red-light districts of Europe, and call it "world travel." 27. Attempt to spend 5 years working at McDonalds, and NOT get promoted. 28. Ensure that any promotions you do get are from stepping on the dead bodies of your coworkers. 29. Needle gun the aluminum siding on your house after your neighbors have gone to bed. 30. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone, and shout at the top of your lungs that your home is under attack, and order them to man their battle stations. ("General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations") 31. Make your family menu a week ahead of time and do so without checking the pantry and refrigerator. 32. Post a menu on the refrigerator door informing your family that you are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for at least an hour, when they finally get to the kitchen, tell them that you are out of steak, but you have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they don't pay attention to the menu any more so they just ask for hot dogs. 33. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan while it is in the oven. Spread icing on real thick to level it off. 34. In the middle of January, place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have you family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4-hour intervals. 35. Lock yourself and your family in your house for 6 weeks. Then tell them that at the end of the 6th week you're going to take them to Disneyland for "weekend liberty." When the end of the 6th week rolls around, inform them that Disneyland has been canceled due to the fact that they need to get ready for Engineering-certification, and that it will be another week before they can leave the house. 36. In your grim, gray dumpster (refer to #1), with 200 of your not-so-closest friend (cite par. 12) regardless of gender, suffer through PMS! 37. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have you wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep. She should then shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble "Sorry, wrong rack." 38. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub, move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you shut off the water while you soap down. 39. When there is a thunderstorm in your area, find a wobbly rocking chair and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket. 40. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high. 41. For ex-engineering types: leave the lawn mower running in your living room eight hours a day. 42. Have the paperboy give you a haircut. 43. Once a week, blow compressed air up your chimney, making sure the wind carries the soot onto your neighbors house. Ignore his complaints. 44. Every other month buy green or red marine primer and put it in a paint sprayer. Spray it over the roof of your house onto your neighbors car. Ignore his complaints. 45. Lock wire the lug nuts on your car. 46. Buy a trash compactor, but use it only once a week. Store the garbage on the other side of your bathtub. 47. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. 48. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night, jump up and get dressed as fast as you can making sure you button up the top button on your shirt, stuff you pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose. 49. Once a month, take every major appliance apart and put them back together again. 50. Install a fluorescent lamp under the coffee table and then get under it and read books. 51. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through one of them. 52. Every so often, throw the cat in the pool and shout "Man overboard, starboard side" Then run into the house and sweep all the pots and dishes off the counter. Yell at the wife and kids for not having the kitchen "stowed for sea." 53. Put on the headphones from your stereo set, but don't plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck with string. Go stand in front of your stove. Say ... to no one in particular "Stove manned and ready" Stand there for three or four hours. And say again to no one in particular "stove secured." Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box. |
|
Navy – that's the one I remember?
My barber is a former Navy Quartermaster on one of the CVs. I showed him your Navy list. Bad move on my part. My 15 minute haircut lasted 45 because he had to stop and giggle every minute or so. I didn't want him "giggling" large patches of hair out of my head! |
|
Wear goggles and a road construction vest when you mow the lawn.
Find a picture of the ugliest bulldog you can. Paint it on the sidewalk in front of your house. Have a gravel driveway? Rake it once a week. Use a compass and make sure the lines are perfectly north south. Have your spouse inspect when you're done. After the inspection they should walk up the middle of the driveway, dragging their feet. Paint all the rocks in your yard. Hang all your mops over the front porch railing. Block all the channels on your TV except CNN. Paint your name on the windshield of your car. Paint your spouse's on theirs. Paint your license plate number on the driveway where you park, do the same for your spouse. Park as close as possible to each other. Don't forget to "combat park." Do I need to even mention drip pans and chock blocks. Once a year take your vehicle completely apart. Leave it that way all over the garage floor for at least a month, then put it back together. Don't worry if you're missing pieces or everything doesn't go back together quite right. If it leaks it just means it has plenty of fluid. When you go anywhere, make your kids get out and "ground guide" you in to a parking spot. Don't forget to "combat park." Show up to work 30 minutes early and stand in the parking lot, even if it's raining. Use as many acronyms and abbreviations as possible. Say abbreviations like they were acronyms. If something breaks, don't fix it, just tape a 3x5 notecard on the wall next to it with the date it broke. Leave your heat on until June, leave your ac on until November. I'm sure i'll come up with some more later. |
|
From:Jim––––––––[mailto:––––––––olynet.com] Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 8:05 AM To: GunnyG Subject: Re: How to simulate life in the Navy Excellent!! How about simulating life in the Air Force? Semper Fi! ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– http://www.panoramas.dk/Atlantis-Palm-Dubai/virtual-tour.html  |
|
An oldie but goodie aimed at the AF crowd:
An army grunt stands in the rain after marching 12 miles with a 35-pound pack on his back and says, "God, this is shit." An army airborne recruit stands in the rain after jumping from an airplane and marching 18 miles with a 45-pound pack on his back and says with a smile, "God, this is shit." An army Airborne Ranger lies in the mud after jumping from a plane into a swamp and marching 25 miles with a 55-pound pack on his back and says with a grin, "God, I love this shit!" A green beret kneels in the stinking mud of a swamp with a 65-pound pack on his back after jumping from an airplane into the ocean, swimming ten miles to the swamp and crawling 30 miles through the brush to assault the enemy camp and says with a passionate snarl, "God, give me more of this shit!" An Air force captain sits in an easy chair in his air-conditioned, carpeted quarters and says, "The cable's out? What kind of shit is this?" |
| Means that a standard MD or the proper type of doctor needed for your ailment is never around, but to the Army one doc is as good as the next. Therefore, a dermatologist, OB/GYN, etc should be able to stitch you up or cast your arm just like an ER doc or a trauma surgeon. |
|
Quoted:
Paint your name on the windshield of your car. Paint your spouse's on theirs. Paint your license plate number on the driveway where you park, do the same for your spouse. Park as close as possible to each other. Don't forget to "combat park." Do I need to even mention drip pans and chock blocks. When you go anywhere, make your kids get out and "ground guide" you in to a parking spot. Don't forget to "combat park." Show up to work 30 minutes early and stand in the parking lot, even if it's raining. I'm sure i'll come up with some more later. These are good! |
|
Quoted:
When on the phone and you are not clearly understood, use the phonetic alphabet. In most cases this will only serve to confuse the person even more.  The people I deal with to get parts for my shop always get confused when I start spelling stuff out for them using phonetic alphabet. |
|
Quoted:
treated by a Dermatologist? that's a new one, background? The one time I hit the ER at Fort Knox for myself, I had just swung down from the roof of my quarters, after adjusting my color TV antanna (nope, it wasn't yesterday!) and caught my wedding ring on the edge of the roof. Nasty gash with my ring still between the gash and my knuckle – read: the ring had to come off over the gash! I show up at the ER at Ireland Army Hospital. Guess which doctor had the ER duty that day? That's right, the Dermatologist! His backup was a Psychiatrist! All Army docs do ER duty, much to the amusement of the patients! |
|
* on a daily rotating basis, have one family member sit in a chair next to the front door with a logbook from 1700 until 0800 and add an entry every hour saying "Nothing happened"
* call someone at your house every hour and say "Bravo two tree this is delta fife seven, radio check, over..." * go to the liquor store and buy a fifth of Jim Bean for $4 and hide it under your shirt and then go to a pawn shop and sell it to them for $16 (Korea vets know what I mean  )
|
|
Have your kid sit up in the sunroof of your car on road trips, throwing empy .50 caliber casings and water bottle at tailgaiters.
Carry four cases each of Red Bull and Gatorade. Drink only what you brought with you. Piss in the bottles as needed and throw them at kids on the side of the road. Eat nothing but vienna sausages, beef jerky and miscellaneous MRE components the whole trip. Have all passengers shit in a Walmart bag and hand it to your kid riding in the sunroof to throw it at the kids on the side of the road. Drive straddling the center line of the highway. Sideswipe any car that tries to pass and call in a SALUTE report on each construction crew you see. Block the highway when you see roadkill, set up a 300 meter cordon around it and call in a 9-Line UXO report. Wait ten hours for EOD to tell you that it's just a piece of roadkill. Continue on your way. In December, turn off your hot water heater. Shower at 0200. The next night, turn off the water entirely and shower with three 1.5 L water bottles, soaping up between bottles. Keep doing this for two months. Park a port-a-john 300 yards from your house. Eat at a restaurant known for food poisoning, and at 0300, hobble the 300 yards, doubled over from shit cramps, in PT shorts and flip-flops. Hang a sign on the Port-a-john that says "Iraqi Toilet Only", hobble down to the nearest construction site until you find another port-a-john. |
|
- Every week, have the youngest member put together a 30 slide powerpoint presentation detailing what each member did last week and will do the next eight weeks. As soon as they become competent, replace them.
- Randomely select one day of the week to have a meeting. Cancel and reschedule every other meeting ten minutes before it was supposed to start. - Require members using appliances and lawn equipment get licenses and safety classes. - Twice a year, select at random a 300 acre area to pick-up trash in. - Put the wife/girlriend on a weight control program. Counsel them on being overweight. Require them to lose 3 to 8 pounds per month. If you don't have another female in the house, request another female from the unit (house) next door. Have the female from next door do the weighing and taping. Require them to attend an after-work gym class. If no progress after six months, initiate divorce proceedings. |