Thursday, August 02, 2007
We had a meeting in the morning and I was the secretary. Argh, suddenly as a secretary, I had so much more work to do! There were a lot of new directions from the Chairman, our dear 2IC who does nothing but talk and give orders to others to do his work. All he needs to do is open his mouth to direct his work to someone else and he's done. Someone else has to do his work, and it generally ends up on us 2nd lieutenants to do the work.
I spent alot of time working on the minutes for the and I groused over why there was incessant and unnecessary detail spent on the formatting and immaculate points that serve no purpose whatsoever. I had to spend a lot of time looking through the whole thing over and over again to spot if I have made any mistakes in the bulleting and numbering format, the underlines or the cntrl-tabs. The amount of time spent on this stupid document is disproportionate to the amount of time people will spend reading through it! Now I am here stuck in an inflexible organization that demands a minor piece of work to be of such rigid formatting that efficiency and productivity is compromised. And to think I used to teach others how to do minutes!! Now it's like a learning curve all over again to please the higher-ups. Of course they'd be pleased, they're not the ones doing it! I was told off because of some stupid mistake like, what the hell is the difference between "02 Aug 07" and "2 Aug 07" ??? The irony of it all, when I was the Chairman the last time, I taught others how to write minutes, and now you are telling me off for something that I was good at? It's only the rank on your shoulders that keep me from saying anything else..
Then for lunch I had to rush over to the mess to see 2IC. Of course he would have the time to sit down in the mess and have a nice long 2-hour steak lunch enjoying every morsel of his meal. I was reduced to listening to his demands, "suggestions" that naturally mean directions and orders whilst I only had a 5-min cookhouse lunch myself.
It's been a crazy busy day. I am having "lunch" and having a discussion over my SATR tasking, it's a long overdue project but then again, I have been really busy and I still owe this stupid piece of project work that I can't say "no" to.
Then as if things couldn't get anymore hectic, I was given a usual 3Da Alpha Bty signature last-minute inject. I had to rush to AFS, Rush rush rush because suddenly, my name popped up in the nominal roll and suddenly I had to take charge of some guys, be the Vehicle commander and bring them to AFS to be the sandbag party! One thing about being an officer in 3Da is that they REALLY test how flexible you are and how fast you adapt to the ever-changing situations that arise out of the blue.
The bus was late, and I was naturally the one in charge calling up the company demanding replacement vehicles immediately and demanding explanations. When the bus finally arrived, it was 1/2 an hour late and of course, the officer-in-charge takes the blame. Someone's really going to get hell for this.
Then when we arrived at AFS, we spent the time moving sandbags to the rooftop, it was tough, laborious, tedious and troublesome. And the sandbags weren't light! Required some real muscle power to get the job done and all the while whilst the men were hard at work, our dear old 2IC spent the time "eye-power" and telling stories about how tough his days were.
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8:57 PM
