Well it has been a long while since I last posted here, not my fault I'm afraid, the computer geeks who monitor the internet have locked our account! The only internet I can get access to up until today is SO restrictive that you can't get on any decent normal websites like blogger, eBay, YouTube even my bank!!! No idea why, it's just the way they run things, good old Uncle Sam….. I obviously cannot be trusted to not buy things on eBay or watch videos on YouTube; I love freedom of speech in the "free" western world!
Anyway, what has happened since the last time I posted? Well the short version is not a great deal. The weather has been pretty bad; dust storms stop us doing much as the visibility gets really bad, it can be as bad as 100metres or less. It's a terrible place to be when its bad weather, you get dust EVERYWHERE! It gets in your eyes, nose, mouth, in your underwear and covers everything! When it's a full blown storm winds can be as high as 40mph which stings quite a bit. I have seen one of the guys being caught out when he was walking the 75 metres back from the shower still wet. I have never laughed so much in ages; he was like a huge sand man. He struggled to see because he had so much dust in his eyes, lol. To top it he couldn't have another shower for nearly an hour because the storm was still blowing, hahahaha. He didn't find it quite so funny for some reason.
This time I have decided to give you a good points and bad points of my deployment so far in bullet points and then explain them a bit more at the end. So here goes the bad points
Bad points
Sharing toilet facilities with women
Engineers controlling the TV!!!!
Lack of newspapers/mags
Lack of E-mail back to base
Internet removed
Lack of bath
Not being able to plan any of my life
Bed space names
Portaloos
Rubbish food/no beer
No day off!
Mortars/rockets
Inefficiency
Other countries getting wages tax free
Fire retardant clothing not available
Too much "touchy feeliness"
Dust!!!!
Paradigm minutes for rapists
Good points
Losing weight
Getting to gym lots
Excitement of buying another house/moving
Getting warmer
End of Iraq 31st May :-)
Bad points - Explanation
Sharing toilet facilities with women - Something just not right about this, lol. I'm poo shy as it is anyway when there are guys around, never mind women. I can be standing at a urinal as well when they walk in! I'm not prude or worry about nakedness but it's the cheek of it all. There are 3 cubicles out of 12 that are designated "Women only" that is 1 cubical each for the 3 women that are here. That leaves 9 for the remaining 100 or so guys, bizarre. Nobody has yet given me an explanation as to why women need their own cubical anyway, lol. I use them out of principle, hehehe.
Engineers controlling the TV - To explain this one I have to give you a bit of background knowledge as to the way the military works for those not in the know. The guys who fix our chariots do not socialise with us. Not out of a "them and us" attitude or us beings snobs. This is just the way of the military. Engineers are very different people to us, they can always be relied upon to find beer, free stuff or strip clubs. They ALL love football, tend not to participate in deep debates about current affairs or care about the wider world. The flip side is us; we tend to be the opposite. We tend not to frequent strip clubs (we do enjoy the freebies that engineers source wherever they go though, lol) we definitely do not get into a round with engineers (this results in us normally saying the next day "I don't know what happened last night, I was just drinking with the engineers, then I can't remember past 9 o'clock!!! They can drink a LOT of booze"),
Lack of newspapers/mags - This one drives me bonkers with frustration; the military system cannot seem to get newspapers/magazines out to us with any reliability. We have only been in
Lack of E-mail back to base - This one is inexcusable and again shows to me how much the military actually care about their own people. Believe it or not, I can't E-mail back to base!!! In this day and age it is shocking that I can't even E-mail to arrange something as similar as a day's holiday unless I phone back through the military operator. This is a journey in itself. I have to dial a number to get the operator, I then tell them the number, they dial it, sometimes I will get the phone answered at the other end if I do then I have to put up with a 2 second delay on everything as well. I work constant night shift and base works (you guessed it) constant day shift! So every day there is a window of opportunity of about 20 mins in which to speak to anyone (providing they haven't finished early, went to the toilet, off for the day or on another phone) Oh and weekends don't count, you only have week days when you can get anything done. Failing that I can ask my boss who has a super secure E-mail system that is used by all the bosses for important stuff (hence super secret) to ask if I can have a day off. I know on the face of it this doesn't sound like much, but it is. The whole of my job works on a pretty hectic timetable, if one thing changes then everything else can change. This means the day off I wanted I can't have, which then means the course I was on after that leave can come forward which means I need someone to cover the day I'm on the course, I off course will need my flight changed as I'm going a day early, my accommodation will need changed as well etc. etc. That is all from one single day changing. It's beyond belief sometimes. We have to rely on good old civilian companies that are decades (I mean this literally) ahead of the military in terms of systems, reliability, usefulness, etc. We use a really complicated and super high tech, super secret weapon that works 100% of the time that is totally dependable, reliable, never fails and is capable of SO much more than our system. It's called Hotmail!!! We have to try and arrange EVERYTHING through Hotmail by speaking in code about what we actually want. This I a challenge in itself, you can't just say "I'm on the 20 April flight at 1500hrs leaving XXXXXX, which land at XXXXX on the same day at 2000hrs" you do stupid things like that and you will have someone sitting at the end of the runway waiting for you with some missiles! You would have to try something like "I will be leaving our main base at your age minus 10hrs, expecting to land at you know where at my age minus 8hrs etc.etc." I'm sure you get the point of how difficult things can get. Just give us a bloody E-mail system that works guys it's really not that difficult or expensive.
Internet removed - The system that we piggy back onto has been removed because one of the engineers used a USB flash drive. The reasons for not using them is because there is a (very very slim) chance that if certain viruses were introduced to these computers then potentially secret info could get compromised. I can't argue with that, I certainly don't want anybody knowing state secrets nor does anybody else. The off shoot is that we have had our account disabled which means no internet! Forget the fact that morale suffers and it's the only contact some people have. It was still removed, now everybody suffers because of one individual. The 5 or 6 terminals that we had spread throughout our camp were all disabled. The next day 2 were turned back on because they were deemed as operationally essential. 1 was in the operations room, which is the hub of everything that happens so that's fair enough. Ironically the other one was the engineers' crewroom, so the people that should have got punished get let off and don't suffer, but everyone else does. I so hate the military sometimes because you can't just march into someone's office and say this is silly and I would like it fixed. There is the frustrating term known as the chain of command! This means you can't speak to people who are more than 1 rank above you otherwise you are bypassing the chain of command and some people get very precious about it. Despite the fact it makes things go SO SO SO slow.
Lack of bath - I don't normally take baths, I would say I have half a dozen a yr maximum and normally because my muscles ache. Out here there are no baths, only showers. So for that reason I always crave one for my aching muscles as my body generally takes a lot of abuse out here on ops.
Not being able to plan any of my life - I am trying to plan a holiday to
Bed space names - My boss took OCD to a new level the other day, he wanted us to all put our name on our beds. Why? Well nobody is sure; we all knew which bed we sleep in! Bizarre, these are the things you don't need when you're on detachment. There is enough crazy stuff happening outside the wire.
Portaloos - I just want porcelain for a day. The temperature is around 30 degrees during the day so I am sure you can imagine how bad smelling a portaloo gets after 12 hours of baking! I would just like to use the toilet without sharing with insects for 1 day.
Rubbish food/no beer - The food here is......... Average at best! I try to eat as healthy as I can however all the food here is very stodgy, laced with salt, sugar and fat. It is no wonder there are so many fat people in the world when this is what they eat every day. The average meal choices are burgers, fries, meat with sauce of some description, veg that has been over cooked by twice as long as it should be and it is all the same! Even the salad tastes wrong....It's no wonder I lose a kilo a week without trying, lol. Beer, well not really much I can add, I am on standby 24/7 and don't get any days off so that means no drinking at all for my full time away. It's odd I don't miss beer when I'm here really. I do end up being reminded by someone at least once a week that "it's the weekend, I could be having a nice cold beer just now!" Oh man, I so want a beer now, haha.
No day off - As I alluded to in the previous paragraph I am on standby 24/7 and work every day I am away without a day off. It doesn't bother me at the time because there isn't really much to do if I did have a day off. For most people in civvie street that might sound like hell to work for 9 - 10 weeks without a day off. It is not as bad as it sounds though, well not at the time. When I get home I do sleep for a good 12 hrs every night for 2 or 3 nights, it normally takes about a week to get back to normal. When I'm deployed I just resign myself to the fact that I will be very tired and fatigued for my full time. Thankfully I don't touch caffeine so I cope a lot better than some, lol.
Mortars/rockets - One of the curious side effects of being in
Inefficiency - Most people have an image of the military as being super efficient, hard working and disciplined. For the record this is right 99% of the time however like every job there are a few people who are key to the whole machine working that let us down. These people driving me into fits of rage and I struggle to not speak my mind. I am going outside the wire risking my neck and there are blunties (people who are not at the sharp end of the military) who moan, whinge and whine about how they can't do something for no other reason than they are too lazy or deliberately being obstructive. I do not suffer fools in any way, shape or form so my frustration goes through the roof and my patience wears very thin, lol. It can be something as simple at having a mandatory 2 hour arrivals brief at 1500hrs when we don't get out of bed until 1630hrs! "The brief is at 1530hrs, it can't be changed". The reason it can't be changed? Dinner is from 1800 - 2000hrs! So they will have to wait until later too eat. I know what you are thinking, why can't we just start earlier? We have to be able to work for 16hrs straight (generally we legally can't work more than this) and we have to be available to work the full hours of darkness and a few hrs after first light. We can't do this if we are up at 1430hrs for a brief. Another example which happened exactly as it is written a while back to one of the guys and kind of sums things up better than any other example of how selfish and narrow minded some of the smaller but no less important cogs can be."Hi store man, can I have a colour printer cartridge please?" the snotty answer was, "No! I can't give you ANOTHER printer cartridge, you have had 1 this week already!" To which the reply was "look around you, all these buildings, all these people, all this equipment can just get packed up and sent home. All of that is here so that I can do my job, no other reason. If I can't do my job and go outside the wire then this whole camp is pointless. If I don't get this printer cartridge I can't print my maps, if I can't print my maps then I can't go outside the wire, if I can't go outside the wire then we are ALL wasting our time. So can I please get the printer cartridge so I can do the job I have been sent to do?" "Eh.... eh...... ok" This is just one very simple example of which there are lots! This is the single most annoying thing when I am deployed and causes more stress than everything else combined
Other countries getting wages tax free - We as far as I am aware are the only country that deploys their servicemen to fight for their country and makes them pay tax. To add insult to injury up until recently there were actually some married guys who were LOSING money by deploying to the tune of around 180 a month!!! It's frustrating speaking to other nations and finding about what they receive in the way of benefits. The Australians receive an extra $60 per day for every day that they are in an operational theatre in addition to paying no tax. Most nations double their wage while fighting for their country. Not us, the government line is that we are not out with the country long enough to qualify for tax free earnings. Interestingly though as government employees who deploy to work in an operational theatre such as embassy staff etc will effectively double their wage due to all the benefits they receive. This is because of the risk of working in an air conditioned office in a secure part of the city due to armed guards (normal soldiers who take the risk of being on checkpoints and patrolling the streets) with plenty of mortar protection, swimming pools, coffee shops and ice cream stands!!! It's just not right, still I'm sure thing will change................. Or B!
More to follow soon.............
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1 comment:
Oh my good god! Were you on a vow of silence for the last week? Looks like you tried to use all your words up in one massive entry......and mine :)
Vegas = T-7 weeks!!! :)
x
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