are you taking me for a ****, china?

wednesday night:

on the bus to the farewell, the kid demonstrated his funky phone... by accessing this blog and using facebook. there's nothing more disquieting that using facebook on a bus.

nice area our old SC lives in, and it was good-weird seeing the whole old crew. my first sergeant, the complete bastard, was overawed by what he'd heard about me from my last team, and that *did* make me feel good. i'm human like that.

so our old SC gave a pointless, silly speech (as is his wont), we nibbled and chatted, and then the kid and i got a ride back to tel aviv.

i hadn't gotten dressed up for halloween yet, so as we started walking to where we were meeting our neighbour i put on my cloak. the reaction i got was way more intense that i'd anticipated, with traffic slowing down noticeably and everyone either being startled and worried or grinning and giggling.
a few even thought to ask me what it was about, so i explained all hallow's eve and why we dress up.
"and that's today?"
"yeah! the 31st of october... every year!"

priceless was our neighbour's (and her friends') reaction when i walked into the nice turkish restaurant with the hood up ;)

the restaurant was boring, but ftv was displaying soft-porn on a large lcd that was so bright that even if it wasn't titillating stuff i wouldn't have been able to focus anywhere else.

besides, there's nothing worse than a bunch of completely unrelated friends sitting around a really large table.


click on the picture to see the original context

today was not my day.

i came up with a brilliant photographic project on the way to the base, but it's gonna take ages before i have enough material :(

the day started with responding to an elephant attack^*, responding (point by point) to a long email from a friend of mine from my previous base, explaining to him how the software industry works. then it was on to watching the kinder receiving messages telepathically from the microwave, human traffic style. and then i was berated by the head of another section for drinking hot chocolate instead of coffee.

i can't figure out if i should continue flirting with the sexy girl in the office next door or not... army girls never work out.

the kid called me up to inform me of a huge screw-up with the cable / internet company. it took a long time to deal with it, including much shouting at the helpdesk support because the technician who'd rocked up was an asshole. this was definitely a harbinger of things to come.

just before lunch, my bank manager called me up to inform me that there'd been a mistake with my salary, and although they'd caught and corrected it i needed to get in touch with the army financial branch.

after a pleasant lunch, with an interesting discussion concerning officer-material and command techniques, i launched into a losing battle with our army's best maintained psychological warfare implementation. sitting on the phone for hours being forced to pay attention to the hold signal because it's a talk radio that's impossible to discern from the idiot who's going to answer...

and when she answers, she says "hi, this is idiot's name. please hold". after much frustration i discovered that someone there had screwed up data entry, and their response was "well, you're just going to have to get that authorization signed at the bank again".

when i eventually got in touch with their superior, i let her have it. i screamed and bitched and really threw my toys out the cot, and on sunday i'm going to the army legal to let them deal with it. but i was PISSED.

nystire seems to be continuing with his sulkiness. i don't have the energy to babysit.

the last five minutes of the day was re-assertion, and then i got a ride home. writing and sketching has taken much longer than anticipated, and now i'm late for pool with my section at the lincoln...

^* i walked in to discover a drawing of an elephant attached to my monitor. i turned the picture upside down, and drew over it so that it came out like so:

then snuck into the guilty party's office and attached it to *her* monitor.