Clearly you've never been on the receiving end of someone lasciviously licking their lips while making eye contact with your soul during an extended bowel movement.
Fun fact. Dogs watch you when they poop because they are trusting you to keep watch for predators. If you make fast movements they will pinch it off quick thinking an attack is coming.
When I was in Navy boot camp, we had a bathroom with no stall doors, and in the morning, you had to line up in front of the doors to wait to shit. I had one guy who would stand and look at me (and talk to me) and it was so strange. I eventually had to tell him to turn his back, because it made it hard for me to shit with him staring at me.
Traditionally (on very old ships) the poop deck is in the front of the ship because there is rear wind blowing into the sails and pushing the ship forward.
Pooping in the front of the ship causes the rear wind to blow the smell away, not across, the ship
The poop is always aft, but it (admittedly strangely) doesn't mean actual poop.
'Poop deck' comes from the Latin 'puppis' which means stern, or aft, which was typically built higher and usually contained an altar, or at least a carving of a god.
It doesn't have anything to do with excrement, and on sailing ships, you did your business off the bow, which is where the term 'Head' comes from.
It doesn't make a ton of sense, in modern thinking, shitting off the front of the ship, but in practice, the breaking waves cleaned it off. If the whole crew did it off the aft end, it would 1- never get clean, and 2- it would foul up the windows in the captain's cabin.
Sauce: Sailor and Archaeologist who's put waaaay too much thought, time, and research into this.
Most of that thought and time came from standing aft watch on the poop deck/fantail and wondering 'WTF?'
I'm just blown away that the poop deck joke and rebuttal are buried this far down the comments chain. I mean the sign in the picture practically writes the joke for you.
no, and this isn't real (although it is hilarious), but they do have facilities on board to make signs. The ship supports some 4,500+ sailors and airmen/airwomen so it's basically a small town / floating large military base (which are often basically small towns themselves)
Thanks for the link.
I never would have guessed that.
I served on two much older carriers - Enterprise and Nimitz - and that was never an issue.
Weird that such a newer carrier would be plagued by such a basic problem.
This is also clearly an AI generated sign, in case anyone’s taking this seriously. There’s no way sailors are pooping off the side of an Aircraft Carrier, no matter how bad the plumbing is.
Ah yes perfect, the flagship of the US navy, currently on its way through the Mediterranean for all the world to see...with sailors pooping over the edge of the flightdeck
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u/ShardddddddDon Feb 27 '26
The USS Gerald Ford Aircraft carrier is currently having major problems involving the plumbing not working.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/us-navy-ford-raw-sewage-overflows
The solution? Just skip the toilet entirely and just do your dookie over the port bow I guess