Burnt my saturday and sunday and half of my monday, and rewarded with just about 1.5 days off, how nice once again, and at the same time meaning I missed my auntie’s birthday celebrations. Really, I’m now an extremely disgruntled soldier, for all the effort and work we put in is simply going unappreciated and unrecognised. There are plenty of servicemen taking part in the national day parade, well some have it easy, sitting by the pavement as a marshall for the performers. Whereas, unlucky souls like myself man the roads, carry and put up barricades, put up with tirades by the public and more.

That is only the saturday bit of doing the national day parade, I play the reserve for the Padang guards, so whenever someone decides he wants to have a longer weekend, he takes a MC and my sunday sleep gets disrupted to rush down to the Padang. Having done ticketing calls and more, we also help out in packing and loading/unloading of funpacks up into containers. Sounds easy? Try carrying 10 funpacks at one go (approx. 30kg) and then up the container. Still pretty simple it seems, how about getting about 20 men to load up 10,000 or so packs a day.

Why pay people to pack and do the dirty work when we have NSF to do the job as cheap labour. Yeah fine, but to work us about 12 hours a day doing this kinda work? Precisely why I say its thankless because no one appreciates the work we put in. Kinda explains why you find some of the stuff in your funpack smashed. Yeah, go complain whatsoever, we don’t really give a damn anymore.

However, we might be CHEAP labour, but when you get primary kids to come do some work, that really is called FREE labour. Yes, apparently the NEWater labels had some error so they got some primary school kids to come over and change the labels. Seeing the small fragile boys drag a bag of NEWater really left me pondering, how did their parents actually agree to signing the consent form to get them to help out? Doing their bit for the nation? Oh, spare me that crap.

Do you know why we will always get complaints from the public? Simply cos’ we are following orders, and this stems from the officers at the top themselves never coming down to the ground, so they never know what goes on exactly.

Note on Pte Khor
Pte Khor must really like me, well according to his partner. Apparently, Pte Khor is always raving about how good I am, and I guess since he didn’t sneeze, cough and fart in my face (as he does to his current partner), I’m very much appreciated … I guess.

Full of Shit
Everyone around seems to be loaded with shit recently – literally. Enroute to the Padang on sunday morning in the MRT, I was about to disembark with everyone @ City Hall when someone had left a memento before he left, he or she had farted! How nice then, when we were playing cards in one of the rooms whilst waiting to leave, Pte Khor also joined in and let ripped with a gas bomb of his own. It was really a stinker and despite opening the windows the smell still lingered.

It must be precisely because of people like Pte Khor who leave stinkers around. Whilst taking a bus to Bishan, some boys also left their mark with their own bombs. What isit these days with all that additional pollution?

Road Measurements
Whilst staying over to close the roads in the wee hours of Saturday morning, one of my platoon mates decided it was safe to jaywalk across the junction to 7-Eleven. Except, he didn’t expect to run straight into a sergeant major from another company, who gave him 2 options – either he would have reported him to our sergeant major, or he went back to where he came from, and crossed the junction properly via the traffic crossing. So there he was, going one round around the junction, to an amazement of a tourist nearby, probably thinking soldiers have a new job – taking road measurements.