Thursday: week 1, day 4

Today was the busiest day so far. I had three bigger things to finish, but with clear priorities:

• Monday of next week, the first day with all soldiers, had to be planned
• The big refresher for basic soldier skills on Tuesday next week had to be planned
• My platoon recon training had to be planned

Of which the most important was of course the Monday: imagine a bunch of soldiers arriving, all more or (mostly) less motivated to leave civil life for three weeks, and they are greeted by a bad preparation. Not good.

The picture shows today’s main product: my idea for Monday. I won’t be here, I’ll be 100 km from here receiving vehicles.

The state of logistics in our course is terrible. We haven’t received lots of our material, starting with fax and copy machines, ending with vehicles and spare parts for the workshop. It is not possible to get a list of the vehicles I am supposed to get on Monday, so there’s not even a way to check whether I get the right ones.

And finally, our captain navigates straight into a quite avoidable disaster: with an ultra-rigid policy on applications for personal leave he infuriates one soldier after the other. People can’t go to important events in their civil work life, they miss shows for which they have booked tickets half a year ago… Just think how happy they will be when on the evening of the event they are missing they don’t get anything useful to do.

In other news, the battalion commander had us do a quiz about St. Barbara, the patron saint of the artillery. How stupid is that, I knew about 0.5 answers out of 20. After that, we went to a hut in the forest and had barbecued sausage and beer or water.

I of course stuck to water because in ten minutes I want to go and work out so this day doesn’t feel like a complete loss in my book.