First Impressions Part II

I can't say I remember a huge deal about what transpired on the bus ride to the Police Academy which either means my memory is going or that nothing terribly significant happened on the bus. The only thing of note I suppose was Mark and I deciding to stick with familiarity and become buddies - a decision that worked out for the best in the end, though you will hear some of the domestic squabbles we used to have about the contents of our cupboard.

When we finally arrived at the barracks, it really was a far cry from SAFTI MI, for a start it was 30 in the top barrack and 12 in the middle barrack. I thank the highest heavens that Mark and I decided to move to the end of queue which meant we went to the middle barrack. Each pair were supposed to share a cupboard divided into 3 sections (hanging space, book and file space, personal space). It wasn't much but it was a price worth paying to get out of the SAF.

You can tell alot about a place through it's sanitary facilities. Judging by the 7 spouts that masqueraded as showers and the 4 cubicles to be shared by all 42 cadets didn't inspire much confidence, though going by the 'if it looks good you're not going to use it' theory, it looked like we'd be spending quite alot of time in the barracks!

The only catch about the middle barrack was that you had to share with the senior squad of OCTs. Ah yes, the senior squad it was quite interesting to see the dynamics in the squad, over the next few days we came to realise some of them hated each other because these individuals were more interested in becoming squad chairman than getting commissioned. Given the immense likelihood that the same thing would happen in my squad, I decided to set my stall out to be the most evil and foul tempered person in the squad so no one from my squad (or the senior squad for that matter) would take liberties with me.

Also at this stage, we realised that the food chain got a bit more complicated due to the appearance of our Course Manager (CM). My first impression of him was that I shouldn't mess with him too much and I felt that he wasn't a simple guy to deal with either. Well both would turn out to be true over the course of the next 9 months, more would be revealed later.