Thread by @jmikolay

Feeling cooped up?

1/ Here's what it’s like to live on a U.S. Navy submarine:

2/ Take away sunshine, plants and animals, news and sports, proximity to loved ones, fresh food, and the occasional drink of alcohol.

Replace those things with enclosed spaces, vertical ladders, 130 people, three showers, and a disconnected cell phone.

3/ The sub leaves port with 3,000 rolls of toilet paper. Hours later the hatches shut and the boat submerges hundreds of feet underwater.

Every day for the next six months, the crew will consume ten pounds of coffee, sixty liters of Crystal Light, and 70 pounds of flour.

4/ In your new environment, lack of space is not an issue; the issue is other people. For the next six months, you’re never more than five feet away from another human being.

5/ You’re about to learn the Law of Conservation of Happiness. Once the hatches are shut, "Happiness is neither created nor destroyed, it is only stolen from others."

6/ You make your own oxygen, desalinate your own water, break apart your own atoms, brush your teeth without water, squeegee your shower after every use, and do laundry in machines that don’t rotate.

7/ Your brain adapts and your world becomes the submarine. Contrary to popular belief, no one misses the sun, no one gets claustrophobic, and no one gets sick after the first week underwater. You’re in one of the most antiseptic and closed environments in the world.

8/ The first time you go underwater, the most unsettling feeling isn’t that you can’t get out.

The most unsettling feeling is standing alone inside a compartment, knowing it could flood, and not knowing how to save everyone else.

9/ In seven days, you transit submerged across the Atlantic, stay submerged through the Strait of Gibraltar and the Med, and surface at the entrance to the Suez Canal.

10/ At all times, you’re within feet of a portable, pressurized nuclear reactor. You live in a machine prone to flooding, burning, colliding, and crushing at great depths. You wear a thermoluminescent dosimeter to measure your exposure to ionizing radiation.

11/ Soon you learn the 50-50-90 rule: If there's a 50-50 chance of getting it right, you'll get it wrong 90 percent of the time.

12/ Instead of sleeping six hours once every 24 hours, you sleep four hours once every 18 hours. If you stand watch from midnight until six in the morning, you work off-watch from six until noon, then you’re back on watch from six in the evening until midnight.

13/ This cycle is continuous to the point of insanity until you pull back into port.

You stand watch over the safety of the boat, the conduct of your mission, and the neatness of your paperwork—hopeless, futile, impossibly mind-numbing paperwork.

14/ Picture yourself driving your car back and forth on your street at five miles per hour. Have a friend sit in the passenger seat and look in your neighbors' windows with binoculars. That’s the control room.

15/ Now picture yourself placing a turkey in an oven and staring at the temperature dial for six hours a time. That’s the reactor control station.

16/ At extremely specific times, you eat food: Tuesday is chicken twinkies; Wednesday is chicken wheels; Friday is scrod; Friday at midnight is beenies and weenies; and Saturday is pizza night.

17/ Your bed is six feet long, two feet wide, and five feet off of the ground. A metallic light fixture protrudes toward your pillow. You have five and a half inches of clearance between your nose and that light. Your hip touches a pipe when you fall asleep on your side.

18/ Your mission is to launch cruise missiles, track surface ships and other submarines, look for mines, gather intelligence, deploy near foreign shores, deliver special warfare units, help train U.S. anti-submarine aircraft – and be *vewy *vewy* quiet.

19/ You’re amazed you could be surrounded by such uniquely sophisticated technology and be so unimpressed, and then find a bouncy ball and be fascinated for hours.

20/ There’s a treadmill. Use it at your own risk. Be advised, the sub tilts at 25-degree angles.

There's office equipment wedged between reverse osmosis units, turbine generators, electrical circuit breakers, CO2 scrubbers, diesel generators, and propulsion lube oil sump tanks.

21/ You soon learn no matter how many entertainment options you take away from people, humans always find a way to amuse themselves with what remains (choose your own adventure in the thread below).

https://twitter.com/jmikolay/status/1244354483607478275

22/ After months underwater, you want to feel wind, humidity, and acceleration. You don't miss the sun but you want to feel the WARMTH of the sun.

You want to smell dirt. You want to pet a dog. You want to make noise. Most of all, you want to take a very, very long shower.

23/ Cheers to the Silent Service. Safe and reliable nuclear power is an outlandish and captivating scientific achievement. It is an unheralded accomplishment submarines have been operating without a major nuclear incident for 65 years running.
/End