Today is a special holiday, kinda like a lot of others that are made up and only celebrated by the few.
This one is based upon a set of numbers that indicate a particular job that I held for a number of years.
Like it or not every workplace has a hierarchic way of organizing people, the job I used to hold was at the absolute bottom. There were days when I found bugs in my food, mostly just bees for some reason. Some days you looked under the tables and found roaches clinging to the underside. Some days we were served this beef stew in little envelops, the sucking noise the cold stew made as you scooped it up still turns my stomach.
Don’t get me started on the overcrowded living conditions.
If it was miserable outside, we were outside. There were days when 80 degrees felt freezing after living in 120. Sometimes 30 felt sweltering. Other times it was odd to be dry.
We had a saying, embrace the suck. Maybe that is what the job was all about, understanding how to deal with life when things didn’t go as planned. We lived that way for years that it just slowly became part of our souls.
Today is March 11th or 3/11. The job I had, infantry, was assigned the number 0311.
Odd how I sometimes miss the pain and chaos of it all.
Tiny Slice Of My Life 