This was a phenomenon discovered on the USS Miami while I was on board as a Reactor Operator. During one of the gruellingly tedious midnight watches, someone noticed that the amount of time it took to shim control rods from one end of the required temperature band back to the center was the same amount of time it took to sing the first few bars of the Bonanza theme song. Don't ask us how we came up with this. When you're stuck in a tiny room for six hours in the middle of the night, you'll do anything to keep from falling asleep. From that point on, every time it was late at night on the old War Pig and I had to shim, I would report, "Shimming for Bonanza!" and then sing:
Here in the west, we're livin' in the best
Bonanza
If anyone fights any one of us, he's got a fight with me.
Unfortunately, no one knew the words to the song, so we sounded like Stanley Spadowski from UHF and it sounded more like this:
Dum didda dum didda dum didda dum dum dumm DUMM
Dum didda dum didda dum dum dum, dum didda dum dum dum
Needless to say, this practice would have been highly frowned upon if anyone like the Engineer caught me doing this.