Yup I'm fairly well aware that it's actually Sunday evening as I type but quite honestly I think this weekend has been busier than most 5 day traditional working weeks!
On top of my normal close shifts I volunteered myself for an extra long very late shift working the bar at a Sgts Mess do on Saturday night, now normally the prospect of crawling in to bed at 5am seems vaguely ridiculous if sober, but for some reason it seemed a great plan to decide I fancied a weekend where I never got to get out of my uniform(s) and spend little to no time in my beloved bed.
Despite having spent much of the last 4 years (my god is it really that long!?!) of my life around the military some things never fail to amuse me, the chest poking which occurs at every single Mess Doo I've attended - as the bar staff this amusement was magnified given I was quite possibly the only person in the room who on one occasion actually knew what the disagreement had been about - what brand of Port was preferred by the RSM, and was settled in the traditional manner with the pokee offering to 'go outside and settle it like men' with the poker...shortly before both were taken away by their respective partners to have a coffee and sober up.
Also the surprise with which the singlies in attendance express when you explain that despite their best efforts no you won't be going up to their rooms with them as you peel them off your shoulder and on to the shoulder of someone else sporting their favourite port stained drinking suit, before they make you drop the tray of dirty glasses you had been attempting to return to the bar.
And the number of female staff who are quite open about their intention for the evening to be to 'bag' a squaddie for the night so that they don't need to walk/drive themselves home. Now in days of yore in the UK it was nice and simple to class these as 'NAAFI Slappers' but nowadays with the numerous different companies having taken on the old 'NAAFI' contracts the phrase somehow doesn't work - Sodhexo Slapper is about the only one of the companies which had a name that fits, ESS and ISS are too much of a mouthful which is sad, truely it made me realise just how much has changed since I first ventured in to a NAAFI Jnr Ranks bar all those years ago.
Of course the most interesting observation was the ladies attending, the cliches about the backstabbing, bitchy world of the 'squaddie wife' really does exist. As an outsider to the Mess I was working at I suppose I only got to see the more overt rifts but there truly is something gratifying about watching one pair of ladies playing nicely while their partners were deep in conversation yet enjoying a complete and utter character assassination of one another when with other women.
That said by the end of the evening I was in the mood for a fair bit of chest poking myself, it seems that the waiting staff think that 'squaddie wives' think they are above themselves and a common comment heard at the bar as they delivered drink orders was that they wished the women would stop treating them like dirt, oddly enough this refrain was most often heard from the male members of staff, the same male members of staff who found it amusing to direct the ladies unfamiliar with the Mess towards the gents toilets, and as observed by one other female member of agency staff working the event - 'Talked about me as though I didn't exist, but blamed me when things weren't done I didn't know about'. Certainly through my evening in the Mess I found all the women I came in to contact with perfectly pleasant, friendly and down to earth - if a little tipsy by the end of the evening, all this without a single one of them trying to 'pull rank'.
Maybe I'm more sensitive about these things now that I am - in so much as I will ever be - a squaddie wife myself but I wonder why it is that as a type we seem to inspire such reactions from those both outside and inside our weird world?
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