Devil's Own

Nothing seems to be going right for me this week. Returned to camp to find that I had been selected to do office orderly duty on 22 May, Sunday. Yes selected to be an office orderly was much better to be on guard duty, but in this there wasn't any guard duty (usually if we have duty, 5 guards and 1 office orderly would be selected, and by bed order). It would have been easy to purport the blame on those who signed extra, for distorting the order system, but I would rather put it down to my poor luck.


Trying to negotiate a change for the friday duty (as my friend who was supposed to be doing it had a medical appointment on that day) came to no avail as my sergeant justification was that if I did the friday duty, who would do my sunday duty? Seems like the only hope of myself escpaing the duty was if someone unfortunately, signed an extra or something next week at the range, but wishing upon that could well backfire, and for all I know I might be the one that ends up signing an extra! Then there would really be nothing to prevent me from doing the duty.

What irks me is that I might have to miss the FA Cup final between Manchester United and Arsenal (duty is from Sunday morning to Monday morning), hopefully I would be allowed to book in on Sunday morning rather than Saturday night. Furthermore, with Sunday being Vesak Day, it means my long weekend would be disrupted, with an extra journey to and fro camp, pretty tedious considering Jurong and Thomson aren't exactly close by (unlike Nee Soon Camp, ah the memories if only I was posted there but oh well enough of the improbabilities). Booking out on a monday morning and back in subsequently the same night is tormenting to me.Dual nights of football is also what I have to give up (hey football nights have been few and far between ever since I enlisted). Everything could have been much worst in true fact, at least I can claim an extra day off as Vesak Day falls on Sunday. If Sunday isn't a public holiday, I would have to do duty without an extra day off, and probably feeling even more despondent than I already am.

Stinking Bedframes
Had more sai kang to do this week, carrying our old bedframes and mattresses to a situated dumpsite. Not much of a problem since we were so used to being the sai kang party. There was a slight hesistation though, the bedframes and mattresses had been doused by a mixture of feces and urine when the pipe in the room broke, and 2 of my platoon mates attested to the smell when they, unfortunately, had to claim back two beds last week, Nonetheless we still had a job to do and got on with it, carrying what was now dried waste encrusted on the bedframes. Halfway through, our sergeant thought of the perfect solution to dragging the bedframes on 3 wheel trolleys (wheels broken of course) by getting a forklift to do the work.

Stinking Tee
Woke up groggy and all as I do every morning, put on my tshirt and got ready to fall in. Strangely, as I put on the tshirt I was wondering why the tshirt still stank a little despite having been just washed (my washed tshirts don't stink as a matter of fact!). Hmm, perhaps it must have really stank before it made its way to the washing machine (but then again it doesn't sound like me again, really!)

As I made my way downstairs, I also felt that the tshirt seemed to be more tight fitting than ever before, squeezing my impalpable muscles. It was either that the tshirt had shrunk from all that washing or my muscles decided to bulge overnight, both of which seemed highly unlikely. Upon returning from breakfast, I immediately took the tshirt off and realized to my amazement that it was medium sized and definitely not my tshirt as all of mine were large. So how did I come into posession of someone's elses tshirt?

Upon reflection, I figured that when we were shifting beds and the mix the week before, I had left my tshirt on a chair and probably whilst all the moving took place someone must have taken mine by mistake and I had inadvertently taken what I thought was mine (fortunately I didn't wear it, or maybe unfortunately cause I would have figured it wasn't mine then).

Hmm so anyone interested in a medium sized army tshirt, cleanly washed of course (I sent it for washing immediately after the realization). All bid are accepted, with the prized tshirt going to the highest bidder.

In all seriousness, the moral of the story is to label all your clothes in the army as there are probably 1,001 identical pieces of clothes amongst the entire block of soldiers. As for me, its off to the eMart at the next opportunity to get a new set of nice smelling tshirt.

Running
Started training this week for the army half marathon (which is to be held in September, yes its FOUR months away!) and our progressive training started this week, seeing us jump from running 8km last week to 18km this week, hmm how progressive indeed!

As with the roulette wheel of how my luck is going this week, we had inspectors coming down this week to inspect all the armskote and out of the entire company, I was one of the lucky 5 whose rifle was picked to be inspected, fortunately mine passed without much of a shot.

This article is just another week in my army life. Linus' Daily Antics