2nd last outfield completed. nine days of leave before i hit camp for the fatep finalé.
cancelled leave (+1 '09 off though) to attend monthly battery cohesion. street soccer and cake-cutting aside, it was down to chambers cybercafe across the road from camp for some LAN gaming. service was bad. the registration took forever, and the dude there had an attitude problem. steam platform games were all down (island-wide, according to said dude) so no cs 
battlefield wasn't installed on half the machines (including mine) so it was a pretty bad experience since i don't play DoTA and the sort. but after our session ended, few of us went to the place next door to continue (or start?) the battlefield session to make our day slightly better.
anyway, before we headed out to LAN we heard unfortunate news that lionel's grandmother had passed away, so few of us (myself, jc, boonhwee, dennis, xinru) went to visit the wake. as we were finding our way around, 3 policemen in uniform stopped to check us at blk 50, havelock road. namely a SSGT Abdul Hadi (thereafter referred to as H), a SGT, and another constable. H approached us with a "where are you going?" and proceeded to question our presence in an tone that was authoritarian, if not plain rude. when we explained we were visiting a wake, he seemed doubtful and demanded our 11Bs.
B being B, asked H why we were being questioned like criminals. H raised his voice and said something along the following lines: "why? cannot check you is it?" "you do something wrong? why you scared i question you like criminal?" "i'm not questioning you, i'm giving you advice!" clearly the tone felt more like a criminal interrogation rather than advice. after handing over our 11Bs, H proceeded to ask B "are you a NSF or regular?" apparently after attaining the rank of SSGT, one doesn't know what details are stated on an SAF 11B. what a shame. the SGT then asked me for my address while holding my 11B in his hand. "its on the card" "oh."
H: "you all live around here?"
B: "no"
H:"you come to a foreign territory, please be humble"
hello? foreign territory? what do we look like? iraqi insurgents? you tell a Singapore Citizen, heck, five of them who are serving the nation that the very soil they are defending is foreign territory. well done. and be humble? you talk to us in a tone à la master-to-slave and expect us to be humble?
H: "whats your rank?"
B: "i'm a 3SG."
H: "you know whats my rank?"
B: "no?"
H: "its STAFF SERGEANT"
what exactly is his point in comparing a military rank to a police rank i have no idea. its context incoherence stacking on misuse of rank. so what if you're a SSGT? if at your level you are demeaning people indiscriminately, does it mean i need to bow down to commissioned officers? does it give you a right to be rude to civilians? to law-abiding citizens whom have not committed a crime and have no intention whatsoever to commit one? does your rank grant you the authority to judge five innocent individuals and to draw baseless conclusions based on pure opinion? why does Singapore even need a judiciary then?
H: "please, you are a soldier, behave like one"
who gave you the right to question a solider as a solider in a civilian context? you are a police officer and i don't see you behaving like one yourself.
after the other two policemen were done doing routine background checks, we were handed our 11Bs and watched in humiliation as the three of them simply stood there and stared at us walk into the wake area. wonderful. and i thought every male individual with bad attitude problems found their place in the SAF. looks like i was wrong.
XML Feeds
