Navy Shower
When the fresh water supply runs low on a Navy ship, the inevitable and dreaded recourse is “water hours,” limiting the time available for showers. To prevent this and to educate the new crew members, the following article was run in a ship’s newsletter on New Year’s Day 1942:
The way most so-called sailors waste water, it is little wonder the ship may be required to establish washroom hours.
If some of you have no regard for engineering efficiency or ship’s spirit, most of you should still realize that fresh water aboard ship at sea is precious, and that the evaporators can’t make enough water for you to waste any!
So, for the benefit of first, second, third and fourth cruise “boots,” we shall endeavor to explain the proper way for a sailor to take a shower; in four easy lessons. 1. Wet yourself down. 2. Turn-off the water while soaping yourself. 3. Rinse. 4. Turn off the water and scram. P.S. If you want to linger longer than that under a shower, wait until you hit the “Y”. If all hands can learn to take a shower on board as outlined above, washroom hours may be extended, to the better comfort of all of us. Be a shipmate! Be a sailor!!!100
Fresh water is always a precious commodity aboard a Navy ship, requiring careful conservation by every man on board. It is also a precious commodity in many arid regions of the world. In the Middle East, a gallon of water used to cost more than a gallon of gasoline.
Water was an especially critical resource during biblical times, and for that reason, was an important source of imagery. The psalmist described longing for God as a deer panting for “streams of water”(Psalm 42:1). Jesus told us that they are blessed who “thirst for righteousness”(Matthew 5:6). The culmination of this imagery is found in Jesus’ encounter with a Samaritan woman. After asking her for a drink of water from a well, Jesus offered her another kind of drink that would forever replenish itself. This image of “living water” presents a powerful picture of eternal life with Jesus and our Father in heaven.
Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
—John 4:13–14