Here is what happened the last few days of my WK.
On my way back to Bern I’ve met up with some other guys from the section. That made the train-ride a lot shorter and helped to find the way through Bern :-). OK, we were about 20 minutes late. But that didn’t disturb us too much, we had the car-keys :D. We then moved back to the encampment and slept the night through.
On Tuesday we went back to the usual schedule, only that it was shifted back 12 hours. That meant we got up at 5am. I won’t go in to deep detail on the schedules, as I have explained it before.
The sad highlights were, that the higher ranking officers were now inspecting our posts (as we were doing day-shifts, this happened more often now), and they were not entirely happy. Some guys didn’t have all their equipment with them (But who needs a raincoat in bright sunshine), or were smoking obviously (Well, that’s plain stupid).
When working during the day, sleeping in the dorm room in the basement suddenly lost its attractiveness since the sun shone outside. So i decided to take a nap on the roof of my truck. I should have known that the captain wouldn’t take that for such a good idea….. I then picked a other truck which wasn’t that visible.
After we finished our shift on the second day packed up all the material we got on the first day, and loaded it in to two trucks. The section then had their „easy evening“ with barbecue and everything. The 4 Truck-Drivers (including me) left for geneva. One of the soldiers was missing and didn’t return his material. Soon we found out that he left some of the stuff at home and was on his way to pick that up. We were already about 1 hour late when he finally turned up, with just a belt. He already returned the rest of his stuff. Yipee!
After about 3 1/2 hours we arrived in Geneva. The two drivers with the stuff on their trucks went on to deliver the material to the Staff Sargeant. At this point I must make a big compliment to our „management“. The Spare-material was counted and bundled through the night and then returned to the arsenal on thursday morning.
At 2am in the morning we finally got to our beer, which our friends gave us. As drivers have to sleep at least 6 hours we slept with the sargeants. that way, there would be less noise when they get up at 5 in the morning. Unfortunately they didn’t know that we were there, so they switched on the ghetto-blaster to wake up at 4.30am. After shouting around a bit we got to sleep again.
At 8am I got up, had some breakfast (coffee & cigarette) and then left for the AMP to bring back the VW-Bus they left for me. About 1 1/2 hours later I arrived at the AMP. From there on, the program was the same like every year. Wash the car, clean the windows (and the VW-bus has a shit-load of windows :-/), vacuum-clean it and then check all the fluids (Windscreen-water, oil, cooling fluid, brake-, and servo-oil) and then, WAIT. For about 40 VW-Buses we had 2 vacuum-cleaners. Great, even more waiting.
At about 3pm everything was over, we got our pay and headed to the train-station. Another 3 hours later I could finally hold and kiss my girlfriend again….