8th Cycle - Day 1

Today is the official start of my 8th ICT Cycle and for this cycle, I decided to rent a car for the next 2 weeks, just for the convenience of it really. 

This is the first time I will actually have a car for the entire duration of my reservist and I am pretty sure I am going to be spoiled by this experience, that being said, the car itself isn't really a great car, I got the cheapest one from the fleet of cars the rental services provides and I pretty much got what I paid for, there is just no power to the car, it takes a while to pick up speed, so when I am on the highway, I feel like I am hogging traffic. 

Nonetheless, a car is still a car and it was able to get me to camp today with no issue. 

Day 1 of my 8th cycle is the same as with my previous few cycles, just a whole day of waiting for things to happen. I was actually the very first one to arrive today and I was quite surprise at how little people got called up this time.

My friend whom I always go through my reservist with arrives a few minutes later and we both pretty much just told each other that we wanted to go to the remote camp, this is honestly the main reason why I rented a car, aside from the sheer convenience of it all, because I wanted to be assigned at the more remote airbase I was thrown to during my last cycle, it's just so much better there because of how quiet it is, my main issue at that time was that I didn't drive and it was very very difficult to call a cab there, but now that I have resolved that issue with my car, I really really wanted to be assigned there. 

So we go register ourselves and weirdly enough, the group wasn't separated like the last time, everyone was together, and I figured maybe they will ask us later, but when we went to the assembly area, the commander suddenly went..

"Separate yourselves based on the color of the sticker on your pass."

... and that was when I noticed my friend and I had different colors, this meant that only 1 of us was going to get what we wanted. I was a bit bumped out that we were going to be separated again, but I was more concern about which colour was going to be the one going to the remote camp. 

The passes were given out at random and usually it is not given at random, the ones who didn't drive wouldn't want to be thrown into the remote camp, they would always ask us if we drove, and usually only the ones who drive are thrown into the remote camp (not always because they threw me there despite me telling them I didn't drive the last time) so they clearly missed out a very important step. 

Anyways, after waiting in the assembly area for a while, we were asked to move to a small room because there were less than 40 of us in total and the hall we were in was clearly too big, and once we were all settled down, the commander tells us which color will go which camp and my color was unfortunately in the main camp, but after that revelation, he suddenly asks...

"How many of you wants to go to the remote camp? Best for those who drive."

... and everyone looked at each other for a while, I knew another ICT also wanted to go to the remote camp as well because we were assigned there the last cycle and we both felt like it was better there, he didn't raise up his hands and I figured it was because no one else was doing that, so I slowly raised my hands up and after that, a few more raised theirs as well and I am very happy to announce that I got assigned to the remote camp with my friend.

 The fact that I have a car for this ICT makes me very happy.

So we took our lunch after a pre-recorded briefing and it's amazing how the commander can still be so long winded in the pre-recorded briefing, people were pretty much bored out of our minds hearing the commander just constantly going off tangent in the briefing and then this boredom continued after lunch as well, where everyone was made to watch 8 mandatory training videos back to back, they didn't give us any break in between to rest our mind, every time one training video was over, they will just play the next one and the next one, and the next one, by the second video, all of us pretty much just switched off because all of us have watched the videos multiple times, every time we get called back, we have to sit through the video.

This lasted for a good 2 to 3 hours and after which, because we still had some time left, we were just left waiting for another hour and a half before we were release because there was nothing else planned and it was too early to actually dismiss us. 

It took me just 40 minutes to reach home today, it was very very nice.