Monday, November 28, 2005
Today marks the end of a turbulent 2 weeks with exercise easthawk and the change of command parade (coc). Exercise easthawk wasn't as shagged as I thought it would be considering how bad sergeant HP put it across to us. Saying things like we will be so tired that we would end up sleeping at our emplacements. There were on average 3 duties a day and I did a 9 hour shift at delta 5 with Maverick for the first 6 hours and with Eugene for the last 3. It happened that my takeover, Zhou Lin, was involved in one of the drills and he couldn't come in time. I didn't doing the extra 3 hours in the hope that my last duty would be cancelled. It helped that it was drizzling lightly outside the hangar, making it pretty cooling. It sucks however, to wake the up the next morning to find out that your duty hasn't been cancelled. The shift 4 sergeant who I thinks is a loser, told me that there ain't enough people. Before he finished talking to me in the armoury, I simply walked out. Don't bother telling me so much bullshit. You're simply just telling to suck thumb and take on that duty. Like I had a choice.
I was lucky to be involved in coc. There are more benefits than disadvantages from the way I look at it. There's nights off after every drill, you get to book out often while your friends are dying from the extra duties they have to mount and time passes by more quickly when you're doing drills with 100 over people etc. The disadvantages are that you get tekan in the hot sun from 1pm to 5pm by the rsm who demand alot from you even though you ain't from the guard of honour. Sometimes you cannot blame them, they have a job to do. Their job is to make sure we know our drills and make sure that we perform to our best on the actual day. One thing I hate about them, they keep telling us it's our day, we're the guys that protray the image of changi airbase. I mean for goodness sake, aren't they trying to make use of us to protray the image of themselves at the same time? It's like if Arsenal doesn't play well in the epl, Arsene Wenger is gonna get it from the board and from the fans. Simple as that. The army system makes a mockery of the rank structure. Even the rsm holding that stick of his is considered "higher" rank than the captains etc.
I'm just glad all these shit is over. It's back to normal routine tomorrow. December will be the month where shift 3 won't have their full strength with everyone clearing their leave. Looks like I've got to wait until the January to see everyone again.
