at the wrong place, at the wrong time

As life in the Army is a constant exercise in the Art of the Redundant one gets used to facing the ancient dilemma. Get utterly bored with doing nothing or get overwhelmingly frustrated with doing something completely useless? Today I confronted secret option number three. Which is doing something that is both useful and not boring but which you would strongly prefer to avoid in its entirety.

While in the army I have been asked more than ten times to elaborate on my computing and language skills and provide additional details on my PhD thesis. After careful consideration of all my qualities my superiors decided that I should better indulge into any sort of possible drudgery, thus providing me with a variety of activities NOT to choose from, which include mopping floors in the barracks (rather dull since it is always dirty), washing dishes in the restaurant (personal favourite) , carry boxes in and out of army trucks (veeeeery dusty boxes) and -last but not least- today's (and tomorrow's and the day after's) task of reorganizing a huge pile of garbage.

The latter, highly demanding mission -therefore the fact that the select group of seven included three University Degree holders- consisted in sorting out a small hill of garbage that contained debris, used hospital material (mostly mattresses) and junk in general into smaller piles of the aforementioned categories. It lasted more than three hours until it was interrupted temporarily due to the unfortunate event of the discovery of two medium-sized wasp nests in the depths of the pile. It is to be continued tomorrow with slightly increased protection measures.

It looks like somewhere on the way, my eagerness to serve the country and my country's needs decided to follow different paths.