the first week & presentation of myself

Welcome to my Swiss Military Time Blog. I'm 21 year-old swiss guy who is being forced to go to military recruitment for 18 weeks. I'm afraid I didnt want to go there, but I try to write about my current life here. Actually I'm a computer scientist - interested in programming, networking, operating systems and lot of different things - but here in the swiss army, I have to work as a device mechanic. They did not tell me what I have to do exactly as a device mechanic, but as far as I know I will (first few weeks are basic recruitment) be responsible for repairing everything which does not have wheels (or "cars" like tanks). Since I cannot really make notes on my daily life I'll just write what I still do know ;-).


On the first day I got known the chief of our section, had to fill in some forms and got all papers, documents which were and will be necessary for my military recruitment. We had to learn how to salute other army-members of all grades. It was a hard and sucky day, because our waiting has begun! The swiss army has its motto "You run to wait and you wait to run!" Therefore, we stood around for about 3 hours until the very last member of our section arrived. While waiting, we trained the formal salutations. A bit later - when everyone was there - we collected all our clothes and finally the swiss military weapon. Below is a picture:

When it was 10:30pm, we drove from one military place to another one (where we stayed finally!) with a truck and we were sitting on the truck floor. It was very rainy and damn cold :-( Happily, after another two hours we were ready to go to bed. On the next day we waked up at (approx.) 5am. The rest of the week we had to learn for our week exam which decided if someone is able to go home early or rather late. I was able to go home in the middle, so I'm quite happy. In the swiss military you have to switch off your brain, because you do lot of useless shit like following: If you walk by someone who has a higher grade you always need to salute him. The type of salutation changes of the type of how many personnes are walking by and if they are all or if there are 8 or less than 8 personnes. If you want to talk to a higher grade person, it becomes funny, let's say - you are a recruit and the other person is a sergeant - you would need to salute him like "sergeant, recruit *my second name*" first, and then you can ask your question. When you've finished, you have to check out, like: "check out myself". When doing this check-in/check-out/salutation thingie, you need to be in correct positions, see here:



Since my free time is very much limited I will only write some parts of it. See you later,


Salutation,

The anonymous swiss recruit