Whilst my Popeye and his shipmates faff around (not) going on BOST (basic operational sea trials FYI)- myself and the other wives and girlfriends of their ship have had enough. 

We have had enough of them going then not going, it’s not our fault everything keeps breaking on their ship. 

So we’ve decided that we need to get Deployment Ready too. 

We are going on WOST. Wife Operational   Sailor Trials. To get us primed and ready for when they actually deploy. (It’s totally for girlfriends/fiancés and boys too btw but WGFBOST didn’t have the same ring to it).

We are going OUT (and when we say we are going we are actually going to GO. Unlike certain sailors I won’t mention. Ahem.) 

To be authentic we need to go to Plymouth and not answer our phones or ring our sailors unless it’s on the way to the taxi before we go out. 

We obviously all have to get absolutely steaming drunk as quickly as possible AND we all have to get up and go to work the next day as if nothing had happened and we’d all had a glorious 12 hour sleep.

I have volunteered to take one for the team and be the groups mandatory person who gets in a fight and gets arrested/brought back by the (non military) police. 

  
Other essential WOST roles include, but are not limited to: 

Someone to call their sailor at 2am to tell them “how mush I love you, I raally raally do, you dahhnt understan” -waking everyone around their sailor. The group as a whole will then shout things down the phone to them before a rousing singsong- sung with gusto, but completely off key. 

Someone will lose their phone, glasses and/or purse containing ID and credit cards. 

One of us needs to have no self control at all and completely trash their (hotel) room. They will rack up a MASSIVE bill for the mess they’ve made (you might even call it a “mess bill”- lol see what I did there?!). The more disgusting and random the better. 

Ooh yes – another person needs to come out with us and not drink, then go back early muttering about how they’d “rather be back with my sailor than here with you bunch of idiots”. Or similar diatribe.

We need a “wanderer”- someone in the group who wanders off at some point in the night- possibly to fall asleep in a storage  container or other random location. We then don’t hear from them for the remainder of the night. They have no idea where they went and use their bank statement as indication of what they got up to. Only to be thwarted because, when on WOST, you have to only take out cash with you.

On that note- we all have to withdraw far far too much money than we can afford and spend it. All. We will then have to use our bank card to pay for our kebabs at the end of the night. 

We may split into two groups, half will stay in a small Irish bar debating and arguing over anything and everything until the wee hours. The other half will go to an increasingly crap number of nightclubs where we will effectively cock block each other for a laugh. This group will end up in either a strip club or a casino or both. 

Also we will organise to have WOST at the most inconvenient time possible- preferably on the ONLY night our sailors have free so we don’t get to spend any quality time together before they deploy. Splendid. 
Finally if we come home at all we will come home approximately 5 hours later than we said we would and leave dominoes pizza in the living room for the kids to find at 6am. 

WOST complete. 

Muchos love, 

Olive

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P.s BIG thanks to the ladies from Popeyes ship for inspiring this post! 

P.s 2-BIG thanks to the ladies from Popeyes old ship for the photo- it’s from the night I went into labour with Sweetpea! 

P.s 3- if you can think of any other essential WOST roles I’ve missed- please let me know. No one wants to be underprepared for a deployment after all.