shoot the hostage!

aka

The Most Aggravating Bus Ride

right, so the next couple of hours were kinda fun:

1) i met the officer who presided over my first court-martial in 2002 - what a sweet girl! the guy who was commander during my first weekend of guard duty came to speak to her, so we ended up chatting for about 15 minutes about army stuff, and whether or not we should sign more years :P

2) sorted some things out, and had an interesting chat with my previous SC. looks like we've got some fun times ahead - it's great when your commanders (i'm referring to my current ones) give you enough free reign to actually do your job!

3) celebrated the birthday of one of the guys who was with me when i got beaten in the lizard in january (should i say "welcomed back to israel"?)

4) the kid and i jogged our section's new fridge up a few flights of stairs, then went off with a really cute girl to the shooting range.

the shooting range: awesome.

i spent the first quarter-hour sorting out entry permission for a group of girls, then about half an hour schmoozing with all the people at the range. entertaining :) and always nice to get more respect than the officers.

it's the first time i've used an m16 since basics, and it was a bit weird at first. two sessions of 10 rounds standing, 10 rounds squatting (day-time, then night-time), and i'd definitely gotten back the hang of it. then the video game started. 50 rounds, with terrorists popping out all over the place. i did okay, but they didn't appreciate me killing all the hostages, so i lost points :(

and you can't shoot the grenades, unlike normal video games. that sucked, i wasted ammunition on that :S
the funniest thing was reloading: i failed abysmally. in real life, you can't miss when inserting a magazine. i went crazy when my gun refused to fire - only to discover, once the lights were back on, that i'd managed to insert it halfway sideways, and from the left side it looked like it was inserted properly.

weird.

afterwards we visited mntns for a bit, then returned to base. i spent the next hour or so with a released friend who came back for a visit, then returned for a couple of hours of random work.

i got a call from our lead at 5pm telling me i had to come in. once i got there i discovered why: OF COURSE there were problems. it's a NEW server, WITHOUT JAVA INSTALLED. genious. so it took an hour sorting that shit out, an hour i really couldn't afford.

i hopped on the first bus, hopped off at the wrong stop, caught another bus that overtook the first, got off just in time to catch the third, which made it to the central station a few seconds before the bus i needed to get to afula.

having used up all my luck, the bus ride sucked. the soldier behind me had his shoes off, and his feet STANK the entire ride. not just that, but he kept accidentally setting himself alight - i shit you not - and the smell of burning flesh was untenable.

some guy got on and sat down opposite me, with a really cute and inquisitive jack russell. i scratched the dog's neck: the man flipped completely, and physically threw my hand away. i took out my earphone, looked him in the eye, and said: "you could have just told me not to touch your dog". he gave me a whole speech about not even letting his girlfriend pet his dog. i repeated what i said, then turned back, slightly shocked at his response. he spent the rest of the ride staring at me, holding his dog to his chest protectively.

wtf?!

then some guy got on, came up to me, and asked me if i was going to tiveria (tiberias, for the english-speakers). i said no, so he asked me where i was headed. i asked why, he told me he wanted to ask me a favour.

there i was, expecting him to ask me to wake him up at some stage - a fairly normal request on a bus.

"do you have a spare uniform for me?"

what - fucking - DRUGS - are you on? ignoring the fact that i would have to be pretty damn stupid to give my uniform to anybody, including people in my own team, i don't know this guy from a bar of soap, and for all i know he could be a terrorist! what's WRONG with these people?!?!

so i spent the entire trip on my guard because of these two freaks, and it took a while to get less-twitchy.

i bussed through to the kibbutz, was fed the only meal of the entire day (but a good one; fried eggs on toast), chatted a bit, then got dragged into signing up for a neat-looking sms marketing thing.

basically (sorry, but it's all in hebrew), it's a service that pays you to receive sms-ads. so here i was, filling in all sorts of details and things, and everything sounded groovy. then i got my cousin to read through the license agreement with me. most of it seemed alright, some of it a bit confusing. but here's the reason i didn't press submit:

"we reserve the right to provide your details to any company who purchases us, or partners with us to provide you service."

so if they partner with company X, who haven't promised me anything in the way of protecting my personal details, company X gets my name, birthdate, email and physical address, phone number, and a few other choice bits.

FUCK - OFF. no bloody way.

my cousin couldn't understand why spam bothers me. i eventually gave up trying to explain. some people just don't mind hanging up repeatedly, or wearing out the delete key.

i did get him interested in wikipedia, which he'd never heard of ;)

anyway, it's late, so now i'm going to fill in this post with pretty pictures, then turn in for the night.

oh - and i can't see the images for word-verification, so in response to today's comments:

thanks chitty :)

moonflake: you just made me smile. unfortunately, NIS 5000 isn't as useful as R5000. ignoring that negative note: there are definite benefits to having a REAL job, as opposed to all the crap i've been doing the last couple of years.

tell you what - if i manage to get involved in aerospace, i'm sending you an invitation to come and work with me ;)