jousting sticks!

Times like this, it's a good thing I live on base. That means there's a cubic metre limit to how much I can own whilst still being able to make a path to my bed and desk, as well as open the doors to my wardrobe. There's also a limit to how much wall space I can take up with furniture shoved against the sides of my room, considering one length has my desk and wardrobe, the other side has a fixed wall heater, and the other two walls have a window, above-bed light, and a full length mirror.

I've just discovered the holy grail of intranets. It's the public For Sale folder for the base. Where every man and his dog can buy and sell from people they may or may not know and trust - other RAAFies and APS, or whoever else is cleared enough to access the Defence Restricted Network. With the amount of people posting, deploying, buying, renting, upgrading, etc. there seems to be no end to the amount of stuff people are trying to get rid of. Oh yeah, that's the other thing... the classic sign that you've got too much disposable income is when you've suddenly changed your circumstances and it's time to liquidate your newfound assets at a crazy price.

So what am I currently interested in on RAAFbay? A Bontempi organ.


I haven't played in years, unless you count a rather drunken dabble in the back of Madame Brussels last year or maybe the year before... I don't even know if I have room on any of my walls for an organ! But this guy's moving house, and I'm kind of doing him a favour, and I get to have a musical instrument in my life again (they're like pets and plants really, I miss them until I realise that they require more effort than I think). Oh, and I can finally annoy my noisy neighbours with MY bad taste! Everybody wins.

I think Project Pimp My Room is going to be improved dramatically by the joys of hand-me-downs that have been subsidised by other people's impulse purchases and throwaway wages! I'm sure the For Sale section will also help once I make it off base, what with the rent ads, furniture, whitegoods and even vehicles I've seen so far. It's like an incredibly parochial Trading Post, but for once, I'm automatically part of the exclusive shopper list.

things corporals will forward via email

The media (accidentally?) missed this one!

The troops overseas would like you to send it to everybody you know.



Don't know whether you heard about this but Denzel Washington and his family visited the troops at Brook Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas (BAMC) the other day. This is where soldiers who have been evacuated from Germany come to be hospitalized in the United States, especially burn victims. There are some buildings there called Fisher Houses. The Fisher
House is a hotel where soldiers' families can stay, for little or no charge, while their soldier is staying on base, but as you can imagine, they are almost filled most of the time.



While Denzel Washington was visiting BAMC, they gave him a tour of one of the Fisher Houses. He asked how much one of them would cost to build. He took his cheque book out and wrote a cheque for the full amount right there on the spot. The soldiers overseas were amazed to hear this story and want to get the word out to the American public, because it warmed their hearts to hear it.





The question is - why do:
Britney Spears,
Madonna,
Tom Cruise
and other Hollywood fluff
make front page news with their ridiculous antics and Denzel Washington's charity doesn't even make page 3 in the Metro section of any newspaper except the local newspaper in San Antonio?





This needs as wide a distribution as we can create... share it!

---

According to Wikipedia, Washington made a 'sizable donation' to the Fisher Houses, so it seems that this story is mostly, if not completely true. I sometimes wonder how far information can travel via the virtual rabbit warren that is military forwarded email. I'm not sure where half the games, jokes, pictures, surveys and trivia come from, seeing as most 'fun' sites are blocked on the Defence computers, so how would people find any of this stuff to be able to send it through a work computer in the first place? Obviously there must be connections to and from the outside, somewhere along the line.

Sure, it just might be my paranoia that Big Brother is sifting through every joke email that goes against our basic equity and diversity training, recording the amount of times particular messages get forwarded around the network. Heck, if I was in charge and I wanted to catch people in the act, all I'd have to do is collect a week's worth of junk mail and look through the headers to see who's been forwarding to whom. Even if stuff is particularly funny, I just practice good netiquette and save other people's inboxes from the junk that will no less get forwarded to them from someone else if I choose not to.

It's frustrating sometimes to take a couple days away from the computer and have to go through piles of irrelevant email from well-meaning friends posted all over the nation, as well as the odd message from the Secretary of Defence. I haven't had to deal with this many dodgy jokes since I was at uni, and that was back in the nineties when joke emails were actually all the rage (well, there was no Facebook yet, what can I say). What's wrong with the odd bit of actual correspondence from old recruit friends? Do people really count themselves as your friend when they forward along a schmaltzy powerpoint presentation telling the moral about the cookies at the airport? Someone actually asked me the other day if I was getting their emails, because I hadn't seen them in a while, and hadn't responded to any of their forwards! I just don't have the heart to tell people that when they send me a 'real' email, I'll consider taking the time out to reply personally. Or perhaps I should start replying personally to each forward I receive, in an attempt to find out what's really going on with the lives of my military cohorts.

Maybe I'm just jealous of the fact that so many people I know seem to have all the time in the world to read and forward such blatantly non-work-related email. I mean, the above story is a quite effective warm and fuzzy one, so I suppose ten points go to the corporal for getting sucked in enough to pass that one on (it is interesting what kind of spin US as well as Australian media is willing to put on celebrity, as opposed to military... and as for celebrity military, well look out!). I find that by the time I've been at work for nine hours, I simply can't be arsed reading, let alone forwarding, any junk mail, no matter what the quality is. Technically we get paid 24/7 to serve the country, so I'm bitching about people wasting company time while I'm still on company time, but that's not the point. Maybe I should start blogging from the kitchen again!

the buddy system

I'm about to do my annual weapons shoot this week, out at Singleton, around an hour away from here. Coincidentally, it's going to be at the Army base where Private Kovco trained as a rifleman at the School of Infantry in 2002. Why is this a coincidence? Well, first of all, does anyone even remember Private Kovco? There was a bit of a kerfuffle about it, because he died from a gunshot to the head, despite him being thoroughly trained in the use of various weapons (being in the Infantry and all).

On the civvie side of things, Kovco's mother wasn't convinced that her son could have shot himself, intentionally or not. A conspiracy theory was bandied about regarding the government having something to do with Kovco's death in order to detract from the attention that the Australian Wheat Board scandal was getting. Does anyone even remember the wheat board scandal? I never really understood much of what was going on in the first place, and was more drawn to Kovco's story than anything else that was going on with Australia, Defence, or the Middle East at the time. So maybe if this conspiracy theory is true, it does have some ability to work on hapless members of the public.

We all love an intrigue, really. It's a sad and spooky tale of sorts, if you read through the details. The Wikipedia page alone seems to make Kovco's mother out to be little more than someone grasping desperately for another answer, an alternate reason, some kind of justification for her son's death. On the other side, there was Brendan Nelson (former Minister for Defence) trying not to fuel the fire of speculation surrounding the circumstances of Kovco's death, and meanwhile, everyone else in the Australian Defence Force was soon to be introduced to The Buddy System.

Now, I'm not too sure what existed before The Buddy System, (much like your average tabloid reader probably remembers Kovco more than the AWB shenanigans) because I did my weapons training post-2006. Basically, the The Buddy System means that whenever you clear a weapon (eg. before handing over to someone else, entering a building, picking up a weapon for the first time) you need to do it with someone else that is qualified on the same weapon. In the event of an unauthorised discharge of the weapon, both parties are to blame, not just the holder of the weapon responsible.

I can see the sense in The Buddy System, in terms of safety and ensuring that people are accountable for not only their weapon but that of their mate's. However, during much of recruit training (we carried around Steyrs for six weeks straight), The Buddy System turned out to be more of a pain in the arse than anything else. Our weapons weren't loaded except when we were out on field exercise, so for the times we were on base trying to madly get changed from PT to cams, or cams to service dress, or just to drop off some equipment before going to the mess, the thing that became an equivalent of road rage for us was The Buddy System.

The moral of Kovco's story (and the reasoning behind endlessly clearing known empty weapons during recruit training) is to always be mindful of one's weapon. Even when we popped into the shops to buy a magazine and came back to a weapon that was piqueted whilst it was resting on the ground, untouched by the person on piquet, we still had to go back to The Buddy System. The problem with initiating such repetitions of seemingly unnecessary actions was that much of the process of going through The Buddy System became autonomous, and not a conscious thing. People argued about how ridiculous the idea was, that a trained infantryman would or could not be aware that his weapon was loaded, let alone do something like point it at his head and pull the trigger. But wouldn't someone from infantry be even more tuned out to the precursor of The Buddy System than the typical Defence schmoe that only has to deal with weapons handling once a year?

Even with my understanding and respect for weapons, The Buddy System has begun to lose its effect on me. At recruits, we weren't told that The Buddy System came into place after the events of Kovco, but we still had it drilled so deeply into our minds that even though we know what it is and what it means, it's so much a part of our knowledge that we gloss over it whenever revision comes around. It's like catching planes on a regular basis - as soon as that safety brief begins you've done up your seatbelt and started reading a novel, and in the event of an actual emergency you probably won't remember what kind of aircraft you're flying or how to get to the lifejacket. But someone else would have paid attention, or you'll be able to figure it out from that information that's buried deep in your mind somewhere, surely?

Defence logic suggests that if The Buddy System were in place, the circumstances leading to Private Kovco's death would never have arisen, and therefore he might still be alive today. I worry that The Buddy System has already become a lullaby of sorts for higher-ups and the lower ranks alike, because when people go through the motions, there is always a risk of danger. Complancency(sic) kills, as stated during a Powerpoint presentation on Airside Awareness I attended earlier this year. I just wonder at the true effectiveness of The Buddy System as anything other than a hypnosis trigger word for most of the Australian Defence Force today.

happy anniversary to me

3 July 2008 - The final day of their current tenures for the Chiefs of Navy, Army and Air Force. The new Chief of Air Force, Air Vice Marshal Mark Binskin, currently Air Commander Australia, will be promoted to the rank of Air Marshal this morning to begin his tenure. Outgoing CAF, Air Marshal Geoff Shepherd will officially handover his title at a dinner and ceremony at RAAF Base Glenbrook.

3 July 2007 - The first day of the rest of my RAAFie life. That's right folks, somehow I've managed to survive a whole year of being enlisted, without even seeing what a Discharge On Request (DOR) form looks like! It seems fitting that Air Marshal Shepherd is stepping down on the same day that I feel like I should step up to the position I've found myself in.

It's been a month of ups and downs at the Sergeants' Mess, with my three weeks service there being a wild mixture of getting accustomed to the ways of a bunch of different staff, improved management style, chasing up various medical appointments and Individual Readiness (IR) related training, and of course, a whole new kitchen to work in. Overall, I think it's been pretty good for me - I'm working with some great staff, serving Warrant Officers, Flight Sergeants and Sergeants, which makes a
change from indecisive Cadets, snotty Gap Year kids, and bitter Airpeople, and learning a lot.

My biggest achievement for the month of June has been my patisserie turnaround. I'm not sure whether it's a relative thing, because I was struggling with tackling savouries for lunch, and to everyone else in the kitchen it seemed I was cruising through sweets bay. Maybe because I was working mostly by myself, and was so paranoid about falling behind
and drowning in sweets that I was extra organised and thorough with my work plan. It could just be a fluke that I managed to get through all of my tasks whilst avoiding all manner of patisserie-related disasters.

Perhaps because sweets bay is tucked away in a corner on the far side of the main prep area, no one noticed me back there having my own minor nervous breakdowns. I've still found that no matter how much you stare willingly at an object in an oven, it's too late to do anything about it if you've somehow put it together the wrong way. There's just far too much faith in chemistry going on with patisserie - I'll probably never be able to trust it and myself fully to feel completely comfortable with it.

However, whatever I managed to produce this week was enough to impress myself as well as the rest of the guys in the kitchen. I've now been tagged as one of 'those' people, one of the golden children of pastry, as if I have somehow been touched by an angel of the bake lords. Apparently some people get sweets, and some people don't, or just can't seem to get a knack for them as easily as they do with other dishes and styles of cooking. I tried to tell others that sweets and baking were my weak point in TAFE, and have been a mystery to me for most of my life, but no one seemed to believe me. I feel like I've won something, because I certainly don't think I've learnt how to do sweets right! I wonder how much longer I can ride this luck for, though?

Despite blitzing sweets this week, there was a bit of a comedown point when I had to rock up to dental to get my teeth attacked. Well, attacked in the good way, seeing as sweets were probably to blame for them being attacked in the bad way. I have a history of shoddy teeth and dental-related problems, I guess it's much like the golden sweets child thing, I think you're either born with teeth that'll give you strife, or you win with a set that leave you alone for much of your life. People in this day and age generally have the same or similar oral care practices - flossing, brushing at least once daily, drinking water and milk, eating apples, avoiding sticky/sugary food and drinks. I just lost out on the dental lottery in this lifetime.

It's been a while since I've had dental work done - I used to pride myself on having bazillion dollar teeth, because of all the work that's invested in there. An old running joke I had was that one thing I escaped in my youth was braces, because my brother had them twice - when he was ten, and again at eighteen or so. Unfortunately, my civvie days weren't the end of dental torment, as I needed three fillings and a check on my existing root canal at last check. I've since had two fillings done, and I remember now how unfun it is to 'talk' about working in sweets and watching Ramsay on Thursday nights when you've got a half-numb face, wads of cotton and gauze stuffed in your mouth, oh, and an array of tools and hands popping in and out.

I just keep thinking, at least I don't have to pay for any of this. Sure, it might be a pain in the butt (or the mouth, you never know your luck with 'free' dental) getting my root canal done again, but when the alternative scenario is being stuck in the middle of some war zone and requiring some emergency dental work, I'm willing to take my chances here on base. One good thing is that I don't find local anaesthetic being shot into my mouth as painful as I used to - it was more uncomfortable getting my back molar x-rayed, while I was biting down on a bit of plastic that cut into my mouth and tongue!

There's a lot of staring at the ceiling while at the dentist. I would have thought that on a RAAF base they could probably put some model planes up on the ceiling. I know I would appreciate brushing up on my aircraft identification skills whilst I can't have a real conversation with anyone else in the room, and could do with a distraction from the ungodly events going on in my mouth. Somehow, I don't think that the dental section has a suggestion box. It's amusing enough that someone seems to have taken the one from the Airmens' off the wall where it used to be. That's either a really strong suggestion, or management has
given up on taking them, ey.

more RAAF junk mail

A guy is driving around the "back of Burke" when he sees a sign in front of a broken down tin roof house: "Talking Dog for Sale"

He rings the bell, and the owner appears and tells him the dog is in the backyard.

The bloke goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking Labrador retriever sitting there.

"You talk?" he asks.

"Yep," the lab replies.

After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says, "So, what's your story?"

The Lab looks up and says, "Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told ASIO, and they had me sworn into the toughest branch of the armed services ... the SAS. You know one of their nicknames is 'The Devil Dogs.'

In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders; because no one thought a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running, but the jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn't getting any younger. So, I decided to settle down.

I retired from the Corps (8 dog years is 56 Corps years) and signed up for a job at airports to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals. I got married, had a crop of puppies, and now I'm just retired."

The bloke is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

"Ten dollars," the bloke says.

"Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?"

"Because he's so full of bullshit," answers the man. "He never did any of that stuff. He was in the Air Force!"