I don't want to be a soldier

[The Liberal Media]

Who in their fucking right mind would want to be a soldier anyways.
Feel for these lads though.
Lots of these army general type wankers end up working in finance as well, they think the camraderie and drinking will make them an easy fit, but it usually turns out to be the opposite as they cannot handle the politics because of their " my way or the highway" thinking

Thank god Dave never bought in National Service for teenagers as he muted the possibility of in the run up to the last election.

 

[parttime crackhead]

My mate is in Afghanistan right now. I wouldn't swap places with him but his reasons for joining up were fairly sound. He had shite all in the way of qualifications or job prospects etc at home, he's now been in the army for a few years, has never fired a gun at anyone, has never had a gun fired at him, & is a qualified Avionics Engineer (or Technician or some shit like that - he fixes helicopters). He makes good money, gets to travel the world a bit and enjoys it, plus he'll be far more sorted job prospect wise when he gets out than if he'd stayed here banging tins of beans on the shelves in Tesco.

Fuck signing up for infantry though. That's proper "I WANT TO SHOOT A DARKY!" material.

 

[The Liberal Media]

I think the american model has it bang on.
They pay for your university education in return for a couple of years service afte you graduate

Now if a university education was worth a lick anymore they would be onto something there

 

[StoneHappyMonday]

Fuck signing up for infantry though. That's proper "I WANT TO SHOOT A DARKY!" material.

Or, being liberal for a minute, it's just your mate but without some basic intelligence (to become a technician). It's either that or join the police around here.

has never had a gun fired at him

Lucky man. Bases still get fired upon.

That suicide bit in my OP is from the BBC, and the story contains a video from Afghanistan from a soldier who came home and killed himself. In the video, and he's a hard looking bastard, he describes how they've been in the middle of a firefight ("sick of being shot at") for 7 hours. He describes Afghanistan as "hell on Earth" and they are not mere words if you see his eyes when he speaks.

 

[The Liberal Media]

Sounds like the ideal stepping stone to politics !

 

[parttime crackhead]

Or, being liberal for a minute, it's just your mate but without some basic intelligence (to become a technician). It's either that or join the police around here.

Aye, reading that back I was being far too harsh. Opinion tainted by meeting a few horrible racist cunt squaddies over the years. Met some sound ones as well though so I shouldn't tar the lot of them with the same brush really.

 

[Mailmonkey]

I wouldn't want to be a soldier for many reasons.

This was a terrible story.

two postmen collapsed and died last week, and another one yesterday. One the same age as me, another a couple of years older.

Royal Mail are still not looking at reducing our workloads in the heat, nor returning temporarily to 4-5am starts (like we used to, where you'd be finished by 12 and miss the worst of the heat)

Our fucking union reps should be calling walkouts.....

At Westminster, several MPs have backed an early day motion calling for a maximum temperature for workplaces.

They say no-one should have to work anywhere that is above 30C (86F) and those doing "strenuous work" should be allowed to down tools once their workplace reaches 27C (81F).

RM will wriggle out of that one....I don't want to "down tools" anyway, just want bag weights and number of deliveries reduced in these temps, the gradients are terrible on some of the deliveries down here...and reverting to early starts when the temps are like this.

Obviously we go to people's houses so we're not gonna have the dehydration issue; once it gets to the point you are feeling really dehydrated you tend to knock someone's door. But the heat is really taking its toll on a lot of us.

poor buggers in Brecon Beacons. I didn't want to completely hijack the thread, but i think it's kind of relevant.

 

[The Liberal Media]

MM thats terrible. posties dserve much more respect
my experiences with those cunts at amazon and Yodel have given me a newfound appreciation for Royal Mail and their service

not to derail the thread either

And if you think posting letters in this heat is bad enough, spare a thought for the Thousands OF 18-24 year old kids who have been put on " work placements" by Ian Duncan Smith
Was reading about some who work in furniture shops in this weather, unloading sofas all day for their £50-55 approx benefit a week
works out to like £1.80 an hour
no breaks
no water breaks
no lateness or their benefits get cut for 13 weeks
and pay for your own lunch and travel

 

[One Thousand Words]

It was all down hill once you started letting butch lesbians into the British forces

 

[The Liberal Media]

You moderate the lounge, what would you know about Butch Lesbians

 

[One Thousand Words]

Good point. We do have mzfluffy, who although isn't butch per say, is rather imposing in statue and does specialise in lesbian porn.

I should be catching up with her tomorrow so I can ask her for advise if you want.

 

[Ismene]

Who in their fucking right mind would want to be a soldier anyways.

Dunno, I've got a lot of time for soldiers. Used to walk the dogs with an old marine who was at Arnhem who was a tremendous guy.

Special forces are a different breed - lot more individual. Don't think I've ever seen an SAS guy interviewed on the TV who I didn't instantly like whether it was John Macaleese or Lofty Wiseman.

 

[Mailmonkey]

MM have you or any of your colleagues ever received anything more....refreshing....than a glass of water when knocking at the door? My cousin (also a postie) told me he never has but then the whole family were around the house so he wouldn't have gone into any stories... You told me you had a few tokes with Villalobos 2.0, any better stories that happened to your or SWIM?

Also :/ RM sound like nazi cunts, can't believe posties are actually dropping dead from the heat... You should buy those dehydration sachets. When I used to train (boxing) in the summer we didnt have A/C in the gym so our coach forced us to take potassium and magnesium supplement powders. They really, really do help keep you up and going.

tl,dr

ermmm, I've had a couple of beers when the rounds didn't all involve some driving, but i'd have to say no now...used to get a few drinks at Christmas and on hot days when there were pubs on my round, would always make sure to leave their post tilll i'd done the rest of the duty...

A few spliffs, either passed to me lit, or someone's just given me a bit of weed a couple of times, usually someone i sort of know, but now i work in my own town, so everyone sort of knows everyone.....

I can't remember ever having anything more exotic....

Re:the posties, all we want is to start earlier, or have some woorkload removed, not both. When the MET office talk about temperatures reaching 30degrees that's measured in the SHADE. It's much much higher than that in full sun between 12 and half two. Carrying a load, walking up hills.

OR another idea people have had is to do delivery at 7am, THEN finish at half 11, 12, and prepare all that days mail for delivery next day...but that would obviously cause all mail, except Special Deliveries, to be delayed by one day.

These are only temporary measures until for really hot days/weeks, very rare...but since the new "modernisation" program, with later starts and later deliveries, began, this is the first really hot spelll we've seen in the UK. You expect to sweat and lose a lot of fluids in the summer anyway, but at the moment it's pretty unbearable.

Dioralyte I think they are called (those sachets you mentioned), helps replace salts and minerals and retain water. Might be a good idea to whack one in a couple of my Ribena bottles...... Cheers?

Anyway, bet it's hottter there, and plenty people working outdoors?

Spain was so civilised, everything stops for 2 hours, walk down a street in madrid at 2pm in the summer and it's dead, shops, banks, everywhere shuttered up, all the flats and houses shuttered up, everyone sleeping, resting, getting out of the heat, in a capital city... (i haven't been there for probably 15 years though, so it might have changed)

Villalobos 2.0 def isn't Villalobos, I still have to get a photo of the cunt though, he loooks exactly the same, and he DJ's at a localish night down here I've since found out....


As I said, tl, dr

 

[parttime crackhead]

Villalobos 2.0 def isn't Villalobos, I still have to get a photo of the cunt though, he loooks exactly the same, and he DJ's at a localish night down here I've since found out....

Amazing. Try n get a picture of him DJing.

 

[Mailmonkey]

It's not villalobos, unless he has a couple of kids and drives a battered Golf.

I haven't asked him outright. And although the house is still getting post it's been up for let for last couple months.

Coincides with ibiza season. Did he just come and rent a house IN dEVON FOR 6 MONTHS. IT FUCKING WAS him.

 

[Swarm]

I know quite a few people who have served overseas, the majority of which have been squadies. I avoid them as much as possible to be honest. The two case i'm thinking of right now are both the older brothers of mates of mine. One of them is really smart as well, but through innate lack of compassion for others coupled with a "you're in or your out" prison mentality, basically signed up so he could get to kill as many people as possible, so long as they were'nt from the Uk (he has no "freindly fires" on his resume, so far as i'm aware). Now that i think about it, he may quite possibly be serving a stint in prison right now - head butted his stepdad and put him in hospital for a few days, no surprise at the outcome, he served 8 years in the forces and was nails before he even joined.

That sort of leads me onto the other guy I'm thinking of right now. He's not dark like the one i just mentioned, however he is from that background where you settle arguments with a black eye not a correlation coefficient. To me its primitive, however, serving a five year stint in iraq unfortunately does earn you points down the pub. Its actually really weird for me to analyse from these two diametrically opposed viewpoints, from the liberal, progressive, anti-war stance that typifies my philosphy on the one hand, while at the same time having an appreciation for the toughness that it takes to be a soldier. Like the way I have respect for someone who can take a shot in sparring. I have apprehention even writing this as in my experience very few people seem able to identify with this apparent contradiction. This is perhaps the reason I am so particularly drawn to Hunter S Thompson when it comes to counter cultural icons that can be identified with. He was a utopian and heavily allied with the anti war movement, yet he got a massive kick out of hanging out with the hells angels for the year or two leading up to his first major puplication.

All that shit aside, what the fuck is going on. 5 maybe 6 people dying of deydration / work overoad in 2013 (a stat just based on this thread). No ones gonna tell me that the army and royal mail don't have the resources to allocate to a mecidal advisor and a small team. Right now i'm guessing all you got in these cases is the odd first aider and semi trained medic (obviously nor referring to the set up over seas). Now i played a pretty intense game of football from 6 to 7 last sunday. I was subtley hydrating above my normal level from atleast about midday. I just happen to know about this from reading football magazines as a teenager and learning how pro athletes would load up prior to an event so that they could lose those 5 pints of fluid during a game and still come out fine. There need to be scientific advisors who plan ahead for hot periods like this and get the right info out to people in a filter down process. Dehydration means your blood is thicker than it ought to be and therefore leaves you prone to all sorts of shit you don't wanna have to think about. If your twice as hung over as everyone else and you gotta run 15 miles in a 30 degree heat then its better your buddies have enough knowledge to get you to bite the bullet and take whatever grief you get for not turning out to run that day. Unfortunately, right now, they are ten times more likely to throw em a stick of (what s that wriggleys gum with the yellow wrapping called?) thinking they're saving their ass when in actual fact they never gonna see them again.

 

[brimz]

has this been done yet ? [video=youtube_share;CpvJTRnSeJM]http://youtu.be/CpvJTRnSeJM[/video]

 

[Mailmonkey]

Tune brimz %)

All that shit aside, what the fuck is going on. 5 maybe 6 people dying of deydration / work overoad in 2013 (a stat just based on this thread). No ones gonna tell me that the army and royal mail don't have the resources to allocate to a mecidal advisor and a small team. Right now i'm guessing all you got in these cases is the odd first aider and semi trained medic (obviously nor referring to the set up over seas).

No, we have fact sheets and RM vidoes to watch ( the ones about dog bites are fucking nasty, always some poor postie had his face chewed off and held together with stitches attempting to speak from his hospital bed).

We are told to wear a hat, sunglasses, and to WALK IN THE FUCKING SHADE. How the fuck do you do that when you have aset route, or on a circular, square housing estate, or when everywhere you go is on a south facing hillside?

WE know it's not possible. We know that starting work 2 hours earlier will help enormously, and , errr, customers (I know they not important to RM) will be happier getting their post a couple of hours earlier, before they go to work even. like in the GOOD OLD DAYS.

Again the army boys, I can't believe they didn;'t have radios, or were they too unwillling to use them for help given the mentality in the forces?

 

[Swarm]

Tune brimz %)



No, we have fact sheets and RM vidoes to watch ( the ones about dog bites are fucking nasty, always some poor postie had his face chewed off and held together with stitches attempting to speak from his hospital bed).

We are told to wear a hat, sunglasses, and to WALK IN THE FUCKING SHADE. How the fuck do you do that when you have aset route, or on a circular, square housing estate, or when everywhere you go is on a south facing hillside?

WE know it's not possible. We know that starting work 2 hours earlier will help enormously, and , errr, customers (I know they not important to RM) will be happier getting their post a couple of hours earlier, before they go to work even. like in the GOOD OLD DAYS.

Again the army boys, I can't believe they didn;'t have radios, or were they too unwillling to use them for help given the mentality in the forces?

Yeah thats what i mean really, i think I'm just doing a poor job of expressing my lament at what we all know is wrong with this country and most of the modern world in general - corporations rule / ruin our lives by way of creating a circumstance where middle management and above just do not give a fuck about the health of the workers they're responsible for. Showing someone a video, while possibly imparting some useful knowledge (i've seen a few in my time, with slight gulfs in quality from one to the next), does serve to put the emphasis on the employee to make it home in one piece each day. The onus should be on the company to know about all the things you mentioned, which i'm sure they mostly do (the only thing holding them back is denial over the full extent of the conditions just so they can sleep at night) however they know we're all just playing a sick numbers game and they don't want to get fired anymore than anyone else, and , seeing as they don't feel they're more to blame than anyone else around them they just push it to the back of the mind and the whole fucking thing just keeps rolling.

 

[Treacle]

Like someone else said, I wouldn't join the army, because I'm not fighting some other cunt's battle for them. They should face the other person, face to face, and fight it out, if they have beef. What problem is it of ours? On the other hand, it should never reach the point where people should have to murder others. I'm fully against war. So many people say 'violence isn't the answer'. They should adhere to that more. I'm shocked that such a 'civilised' society should even have to resort to guns and murder. If people stopped wanting to hurt other people (let's face it, signing up for the army means that you want to shoot some 'Pakis', in a lot of cases), it'd be far better. This country is always willing to kill some foreigners. Why? If I killed some stranger, it'd fucking destroy me.