<p>Bill - A lot of different reasons made me want to get out of subs, so here’s just a few. While the crew was fantastic and my fellow officers were great, I didnt want to spend the rest of my career doing something that I wasn’t fully into. My wardroom was undermanned and I and was pretty much straight three section duty for my last half of my tour. When I wasnt on duty, I was either working long days or I underway, so pretty much I was never home. 100+ hour work weeks were pretty common and very draining. Fast attack subs also have a common problem of packing too many things to do into too few hours. Between all the various training requirements, maintenance, and all the other assorted things that came up, there was no time to really get a grasp on what needed to be done and plan for the future. Anytime anything unexpected arises, the ship turns into crisis mode because there simply isnt enough slack time to plan for the unexpected. This creates a very tense, hectic, and stressful work environment. Additionally, I got tired of being in an environment that judged your work ethic on how late you stayed at work, and an atmosphere of getting reamed out for any minor thing that went wrong.</p>
<p>I discovered the Engineering Duty Officer community when I was in the shipyard. Those guys always looked like they enjoyed their jobs and had all the same job satisfaction without all the pain. I figured that was probably the best way to go and maintain my connection to submarines and my sanity was to transfer to Engineering Duty.</p>