Weird. I always take the top bunk and never step on the bottom bunk to get there: that’s what the little ladder is for.
I play the size card.
Navy racks were Spartan: IIRC 3’ x 7’ x 3" thick. But the racks for the Marines were worse: folding wire shelves 4 deep, thousands all jammed in together; puking on each other in heavy seas, farting and snoring and jerking off. And one time a cold virus swept through the ship. Just awful.
Operative point being “reasonably well made”. Had a buddy in Iraq who the top bunk collapsed onto him. He wasn’t hurt, other than a few scratches I think, but it was damn funny!
I used to always take the top bunk whenever I slept in bunk beds, just because it was neat. Now days though, if I had to do it, I’d take the bottom. Easier to get to the bathroom from. 
This thread is all Bunk! 
I’ve never had a bunk bed with a ladder. I don’t know if they were lost or if they never existed. Do most bunk beds for adults come with a ladder?
Yet another great argument for being on top! That’s not something you want raining down on you unsuspectingly in the middle of the night.
When I was in college (1980s), and some of our dorm rooms came equipped with bunk beds, ladders were never included.
I’ve always preferred the top bunk, too, for reasons of generic coolness (even if I’m the only one in the bed). Fortunately, the whole bodily fluids thing has never been an issue in my case.
And most bunk beds I’ve seen have a frame of either 4x4 lumber or heavy steel, and all of the extra load beyond a normal bed is just in straight compression, anyway. Have you ever heard of an ordinary bed collapsing to the floor? Why would the top bunk of a bunk bed be any more likely to than that?
Argument for bottom bunk:
In jail (I’ve only been in a County Jail, and only for a few days), the lights in the cell don’t turn off at night, so if you’re in the top bunk you’re staring at a light all night, while the guy on bottom gets darkness and a good nights sleep. So if you’re stuck on top, and the guy on bottom changes cells, snag the bottom bunk before the next guy in does! I learned the hard way. 
The bunk beds in hostels and the like are rarely well made or particularly sturdy. The mattress is often supported on a sort of wire-mesh thing, rather than a box spring or wooden slats as in a normal bed. A combination of an old bunk bed and a large sleeper can make the mesh stretch surprisingly far (which is highly alarming if you’re on the bottom). I imagine that construction would make them somewhat more prone to collapse, but I’ve still never seen one go down.
On one occasion my brother, who was on the top bunk, decided it was too much trouble to get up and walk to the bathroom after a night out drinking. Lucky for me he really didn’t have a prehensile penis :eek:
Was the person on top fat? Sorry, I had to ask.
He wasn’t fat (he is now though), but he was pretty built. Probably 230 lbs, maybe more. The big point though, was that the beds were poorly made. The wood of the legs was soft, and the lags holding the bed were too short, and they weren’t new by any stretch of the word. We fixed it with 550 cord and a couple of .50 cal casings.
Those in train sleeping cars do. And add me to the list of “top bunkers”; less likely to be woken up when the top-bunker needs to go someplace and can’t figure out how the whole “scoot up to the ladder, climb down” thing works.
When we moved to a new city when I was 5, my dad bought us bunk beds. Basically, they were 2 beds. When my brother and I got separate rooms, we used them as twin beds. They even came with little decorative balls on dowels that replaced the metal pins on the bottom bunk bedposts to hide the holes. We used those beds, later as twin beds until we left for college.
Two reasonably large adolescents could wrestle pretty viciously and bounce around and otherwise engage in sibling horseplay without breaking them as twin beds - they were just standard twin beds. The top was probably about 3 feet from an 8-foot ceiling when set up. I imagine if someone got on the top and got the whole thing rocking back and forth, eventually you would rip the metal bolts out of the wooden bedposts or something; but it would be some severe rocking with real warning crack noises - you could probably break a child’s twin bed that way too.
I went to camp for lots of years. The winter camp had wooden bunk beds built into the cabins. Those things weren’t moving and you’d have to take a sledgehammer to them to break them. I don’t remember if they had ladders, but I think they did, built onto the long side.
The summer camp (different camp) had metal bunk beds that could be moved around. Basically it was a steel frame with a piece of plywood as the bottom of each bed. No ladder - you climbed off the short end, which had bars close enough together that unless you were little (which some of the kids were) you could get down without having to drop any. The top bunks were usually highly prized by the younger kids. The older ones wanted NOT to have a top bunkie because then they could put out their things there.
I don’t have any stories of destroying one, but generally the counselors had to watch who was getting the top bunk. If the kid was too large, they got only one mattress, because otherwise they could roll over the top bar. If they were too small, they had to have two otherwise they’d roll under it.
Even as an adult (I think I stopped volunteering when I was 25 or so), I could sit up on the top bunk without hitting my head (I’m about 5’5"). However, one daddy & daughter weekend with my dad, he was walking about at night without his glasses and he walked into the corner of one. They ended up taking him to the hospital (or er, I don’t recall - I didn’t go with them) to check he hadn’t done any bad damage. (He just scratched it).
The bunks would wiggle around when the top person rolled around. I think it would be pretty difficult to get one to even fall over though.
At college, we had adjustable height beds that amounted to two separate wooden boards with grooves and a wire mesh with hooks on it to hold up the very slick mattress.
Despite this, not one but quite a few people I know set them up as a bunk bed, with one person’s bed on the top hook and the other person’s on the bottom, and had no problems.
I also knew some people who didn’t have those beds and built a frame out of wood to put their bed on top so they could have a couch on the bottom, in order to conserve space. I, on the other hand, was always rather minimal in both sets of rooms.