Here is a little from FH...I asked him to tell me about the ship and about his life aboard, so he will be sending bits and pieces to add to my rambling posts.
Walk down the pway (known as a hall in ordinary English) of any ship and you'll see the following: Arcane numbers and letters in enigamatic arrangements on the bulkheads (walls), a wide panolopy of elecrical boxes used for a variety of things, brackets holding everything from a plain wrench to a 4x4 wooden beam to a strecher made out of metal and chicken wire, and clusters of pipes and wires running through the overhead (ceiling) to their destinations.
Every fifty feet or so a door blocks the hall which latches that easily com down to make a watertight seal. Each of the doorways is a oval that rises above the floor, guarenteed to bang the ankle of the unwary. Some lucky doorways known as kneeknockers come up a little higher. Every ten feet a smaller door leads into a space (room) to handle one of the many things needed to run a ship. These doors are also sealable and have locks. In fact the only ordinary doors on the ship are the head (oops I mean toilet) doors.
There is nothing pretty about the way Navy builds its passageways. Things need to be accessable at a moments notice. Instead of pretty, we go for clean. Clean is defined as a fresh coat of paint without any dirt or dust on it. The bulkheads are often painted white and blue, while the overheads are painted over with grey...and by that I mean everything is painted including the wires and pipes. Every day for an hour in the morning and a hour in the afternoon people are sent out to clean up, sweeping up the accumulation of dirt on the floor and wiping down every single horizontal surface, polishing the brass and sandpapering the steel.
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