Seventh Cycle - 9 Day

For the trip to camp today, instead of taking the taxi straight from home, I decided to go to Simei and have a heavy breakfast first, this way the Grab will be cheaper and I can also get a proper meal before I book in, so I got myself  2 sets of KFC breakfast, a porridge and one of their wraps which lasted me the entire day pretty easily.

It is nice to visit Simei now because that place feels familiar after having gone there almost on a daily basis late last year for a project. Said project had a pretty smooth renovation, I really enjoyed talking to the homeowners, who felt more like friends than clients, they are one of the very few clients I have had so far that I truly enjoy texting and talking to, so Simei brings about positive feelings.

Anyways, I had my breakfast there, got a few items from 7-11, got a Grab and the first thing the Grab lady told me was...

"I almost wanted to cancel your ride because of the location you are going to, I can tell you only 1 in every 100 grab drivers will be willing to take your ride request to go the your camp because we can never get any customers when we leave that place."

... and to think, I was feeling confident that I could actually get a ride out later in the evening because I will not be ending as late as I did previously at 7.30pm, but after what she said, it just made me realize that I was actually extremely lucky to have gotten rides out from there twice the past week.

I reach camp, and I start my duty, the first guy who was doing the duty with me was only doing it for 2 hours, so I figured I didn't want to invest too much time talking to him if he is going to be gone in like 2 hours, I mean I did try a little but he wasn't really trying to keep the conversation going either, so I gave up and started playing with my phone.

2.5 hours later, his replacement finally arrives and because he had to do an extra 30 minutes of duty, he got upset at the replacement, who then kept apologizing and explaining that it was not his fault, that he had to attend a briefing and everyone also got held up, the first guy then left in a huff, saying that it is not fair. 

The replacement, whom I shall just called Harold, was a bit more open to conversation, but he is someone who does things by the book, so he told me that I can't use my phone during the duty because he was just briefed about it, apparently one of their active was caught by one of the regulars for using a phone, so now they are implementing a ban on everyone in the platoon, technically I am not the platoon, I am an ICT, so technically, that ban does not affect, and even if I were to get caught using a phone, the higher ups wouldn't be able to do anything other than tell me to be more "tactical" about it, as ICTs, we are treated and spoken to as equals by the regular commanders. I did tell Harold that I was an ICT, that the ban probably doesn't apply to me, but I could tell how nervous he was about potentially getting in trouble by proxy, and I also didn't want him to get into trouble, so I agreed to his request and put my phone away.

Harold then apologizes to me about it and asks me to sit next to him, so we can spend the next few hours chatting to kill the time. He is a nice guy, but he is also the type that talks more than he listens, and he is a bit of a geek, so he was talking about games and animes, more on the former than the latter because our taste in anime is different.

We started talking about Genshin Impact, a game I have been playing for the past few months, so that went well, I could relate to what he was saying, we talked about our luck in game, how much we spend, he shares this long story about how lucky his sister was because she got all the rare characters. After that, things kinda went a bit dull for me because he started talking about Team Fortress 2, which I never really played a lot of, and DOTA 2, which I don't enjoy playing and haven't touched since 2013 maybe.

He was trying to impress me and telling me about the strategies he used in the game that is very unorthodox, that are "high risk", telling me uses what weapon with what skill and I just didn't know what he was really talking about, and he was talking about it in such detail, I think expecting to be blown away by how insane his tactics are, but once again, I caught no balls...

"I play with my friend, he uses the Zolar and I use Hoalr, then I equipped my Hoalr with Gualr, and get a high crit rate, but because Gualr comes equipped with FHOA, it gives me this buff that makes Zolar invulnerable to BAUA."

.... didn't understand what he was saying, honestly didn't care too much about it, so I just smiled and went "Oh, wow, didn't know you could do that" and all those sort of reactions , and he just kept going on, first with Team Fortress 2, and then with DOTA2, doing the same thing, using terms I don't understand and just going on with his longwinded stories. 

Towards the end of the duty, we started talking about Genshin Impact again because I kinda had enough of listening to him talk about things I can't relate, and so he tells me we can end our duty maybe 5 minutes earlier and he can show his characters to me because he wanted to flex. 

We end 5 minutes earlier and I was honestly more concerned about getting a Grab than his Genshin Impact progress, so I return my rifle, starting packing my stuff and I could sense him hovering behind me, phone in his hand and he gestures towards his phone and then starts showing off  his characters to me. It was endearing I guess, he started flexing to me, showing me the weapons he has collected, the characters he has, I was honestly spending more time glancing at my own phone trying to see if anyone has accepted my request, no one did, the presentation of his lasted for maybe a minutes and he was done, I had to go, so I told him I was going to make a move, he plops himself down on the closest chair he could find and went on to admire his own characters after, I think also a little dejected that I was not as impressed as he thought I would be and a lot of that has to do with the fact that my characters are stronger than his, so it's a little bit difficult to be really impressed.

I head out of the camp, no Grab in sight, kept getting told that no driver is around, that I should try again later. I would have gotten a little anxiety had it not been for the fact that Steven was around, he will be ending his duty 7.30pm,so if I really couldn't find a Grab, I could always hitch a ride out from him, I just need to wait till he was done, which is better than the first time I was stuck in camp with no backup plan on how to leave the base.

So in the middle of me trying to find a Grab and accepting my fate that I will be stuck until Steven completes his duty and drives me out, a food truck comes out from the base and the driver makes eye contact with my desperate self, he could see I was desperate, so he started gesturing to the passenger seat beside him, asking me if I needed a ride out and I took his offer up immediately.

I was so grateful, climbed into the van and this nice driver drives me to Changi Village. The ride took about 20 minutes because he was driving at a speed limit, but I can't complaint, it is a free ride out, he was quite chatty as well so the ride was not exactly 20 minutes of awkward silence. 

I arrive at the bus stop at around 6.45pm, took the wrong bus and reached the closest MRT Station at 7.15pm, it's really quite ridiculous how long it actually took for me just to reach the closest MRT because if I had not been thrown in the East airbase and was in the West, I could have reached home at 7.30pm!

Finally reach Beauty World MRT at around 8pm, got some microwavable food from there and then headed home for the day.

And so with that, I am now left with 1 more 6 hour shift, once that is completed, this cycle will be over, but before that last shift, I will be going for a 1 night Staycation alone, just for fun, decided to book a boutique hotel room using the Rediscover Voucher in Chinatown, will see how that goes, and if it is enjoyable, I might do more solo staycations in the future. I just like the idea of coming into an aircon bedroom and not have to do anything.