Loathe as I am to contaminate this sacrosant journal with green, I feel I should write this down for all posterity, so that in the future I can look back and laugh at the stupid problems I had when I was younger.
I had my first duty as a guard commander (second-in-command) yesterday, and a bit of today. I can honestly tell you that it is a terrific1 job and I really salute those men who do it every day for two years.
I am honour-bound (and also bound by other prevalent and undesirable punishments) not to reveal precisely how terrific the job is, but the thing I want to rant about involves something that has nothing to do with any organisation whatsoever, but a flaw in the human design system.
Firstly, I get scheduled to sleep, however minimally, from about 10pm to 2am. I go to bed after turnout, which is so hygienic and spotless and not shared by multiple people at all, and lie there for an hour until I fall asleep. Typical problem; but it's duty, so oh well, no big deal.
Then I'm awake from 2am to 7am, fuelled by nothing by Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times (which explains the "highest form of flattery" style of this post) and the fear of seven extras gnawing at my soul. That's okay too; I managed to stay awake pretty fine with two hours of sleep.
So finally when I get on the bus and I'm on the way home, I'm reading again, since it kept me awake for the past six, seven hours. I'm halfway down the page, when I wake up and realise I've missed my stop by about three of them. I had completely no idea when I fell asleep, or how, but the funny thing is, I know at roughly what point I fell asleep, due to the rest of the page being unfamiliar.
Of course, it's funny now, future me, but at that point when it's nine-thirty in the morning and you have to cross hordes of traffic just to get to the bus stop opposite and take a bus three stops backwards which would have been completely unnecessary if not for your falling asleep, it was quite awful.
1 Horrible-horrific; terrible-?
Because [undecipherable pictogram] you.
The Edna Man
