Of swines and maggots

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YawN - Saturday, September 04, 2004 at 1:32 PM

It really beats the shit outta me why people actually bother to travel all the way to a secluded corner of Singapore, with minimal transport convenience, $4 Nasi Lemak and hundreds of stinky young adults wearing green, just to fool around with display weapons and awe at the incredible machines, which we, the NSFs of Singapore play around with every day of our miserable 2 1/4 years in the army. Actually, it's 2 1/6 months now. Anyway, amidst manning the booth senselessly and answering questions by some old geezers (which i conveniently smoked my way through... Singapore did acquire the attack helicopters last year, did it? Hmm... oh well, doubt the old buggers recognise me anymore.) I've decided to analyse the behavioural patterns of the typical Singaporean and pick out the typical AOH-goers:

1. The NSF.
Yes, the easiest to spot, with or without uniform. Making up the bulk of the crowd, the NSF is usually forced to attend this yearly event to make up the numbers. We can't have weeks of planning and preperation go down the drain can we? Forced may be too strong a word. It's probably more of, the NSF given 2 choices: the devil or the deep blue sea. Yeessssiiirreee, either return to camp on saturday to run, do area cleaning and other misc. sai kang (translate: shit work), or attend the damn event and book out from there altogether. The popular choice is rather obvious.

2. The Laojiao Uncle.
The laojiao uncle is usually 40 years and above. With or without his wife tagging along, the laojiao uncle most likely served his NS under the old school SAF, and usually starts his army stories with "Hai ya... you NSFs have it good now. Why, i remember back in my time, i used to ______" (Fill in blanks with anything that has the severeness between being burnt alive and being impaled by a rusty blunt sword.) The laojiao uncle is armed with 1001 questions for the unexpecting NSF manning any booth. May it be the apaches, or the matadors, usually, he will ask questions which he already knows. This is in hope of getting a wrong answer from the under-knowleadged (which is the result of being under-paid) NSF, cornering the poor bastard, and achieving satisfaction that a 40 year old balding, tubby civilian is more well-versed in the SAF's equipment than, ahem, the dude personally using that equipment to defend the dumbass laojiao uncle.

3. The Big Family
AOH is another event for family outings where the parents can bring the grandparents and the children too, without worrying too much about entertainment for the WHOLE family. The kids will have their balloons, which they often conveniently let go of in the middle of the auditorium .(which justifies my popular belief that kids nowadays are born with holes in their hands) The grandparents get to see the fruits of their labour from their early contribution to the country, or at least they can claim so and look good. The father and mother can enjoy seeing their parents and kids having fun. Of course, that's the perfect picture. Often left out is the extremely hot weather, the crying and screaming cos the kids lost their balloons and want another one, the grandparents needing to stop pretty often as one attraction is ridculously far from the other, and of course, the classic call of nature when you're really far away from the next toilet, which is already packed. Yes, that's the big picture.

4. The Young Couple.
The Young Couple can be categorised further into different sub-categories. Firstly, the couple with the macho guy who has ORD-ed. He is very likely to put on his old GUARDS or MAKANDO, err i mean COMMANDO, unit polo shirt, usually with sunglasses posuer-ishly on the back of his neck or on his head. This is a good opportunity for the guy to give the girl a first hand experience of his army life, of course after going through 1000x exeggeration, to be more macho. (a la the laojiao uncle) The girl will be awed, hook up with the guy for a couple more months, then break up cos the relationship is dysfunctional to begin with and cos she found a more macho guy. But i digress. Anyway, the next young couple will be the Recently Got-together couple. As the 2 have just met, other than the typical things Singaporeans do, i.e. shopping, movies, the guy is running out of ideas and that's where AOH comes in. He may or may not realise that this event actually sux but definitely realises that he will lose the girl if he doesn't organise a more interesting date. So, he cooks up this story on how AOH is going to be oh so fun, and tada, a date that looks like the guy has put in effort to organise. It really doesn't matter if AOH turns out to be boring, it's the effort that counts. Really. The guy is in the safe zone... for now.

4. The "Going After The Guy In Green" Gal.
Heyheyhey! Yeah! Kabu, this one's for you my esteemed pal. The gal who is interested in the guy in green. Ok, maybe i should include the guy-watching gal wh adores men in green, but that's not my interest. It's the gal who has a SPECIFIC motive, a SPECIFIC guy, heh.... you catch my drift. It's part of the chasing game. Whether she likes you or not pal, i really don't know. But think about it, a gal, who has definitely something better to do on s saturday evening, DRAGGING her fren along... TO ATTEND AOH! Brother brother brother, that to me, is jackpot. Cute.

That's the list of majorities in an AOH crowd on any given day. The minorities will include the middle-aged dude with no where else to go, foreign visitors, and ahem, foreign spies.

Let's see, 430 am, need to wake up 1200 tmrw. 7 1/2 hours sleep... damn, missed on my minimum 8 hours sleep on a weekend day routine again.

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