My National Service Life

As I have related in my previous post, I am back to serving the remainder of my four months National Service liability. As of next week, I will be officially promoted to a new rank of Corporal First Class. Well… it doesn’t really help much, except that I get a $40 pay increment, which isn’t a significant sum of money. However, I think getting this rank is cool, simply because it sounds much nicer than just Corporal alone. Ok… I’m lame.

Anyway, in my first week of return, I am pretty excited about what I can potentially do during this time. There were some issues which have been sitting for some time until I went back and I utilized my expertise in debugging to identify the source of the problem. It was a major ego booster for me to know that I am still significantly useful even if I am just a returning disruptee. I was also tasked to help out with something significant, but that has been put off tentatively. By the second week, I have written two projects to help my department meet the quota set for unit suggestions. In that period of time, I was really quite busy but happy.

Now… in my third week, life isn’t that great anymore. I have pretty much digged out every little interesting thing that I can do and completed them. I am afraid of boredom so I went ahead and arrowed myself to do some routine data entry, which was tasked to another person. I guess I may be stuck doing that for some time until something interesting crops up.

Anyway, during the lunch outing for my branch today, I overheard an officer praising a clerk for being able to write papers well and that if every clerk was like him, there would be no need for officers or something. I was actually thinking that many clerks are actually qualified to write papers for submission, since most of us are potential degree holders. Why is it that most officers do not trust us enough to write papers for them, when we are not going to be submitting them directly anyway? If we are really not up to standard, they can always edit it or even throw it into the waste box.

When I heard that, I felt slightly insulted because it is sort of inferring that clerks are being looked down upon as inferior beings who can’t write. I believe that some of the clerks have very good English and interesting ideas, but sadly our talents are wasted during our time in NS because most officers do not assign ‘thinking’ tasks to clerks and most clerks do not know what the officers are doing, so we can’t take our own initiative to help out as well.

Moreover, the culture is difficult to change. Most NSFs I know treat NS as a liability and hates it to the core, so they hate any extra work that comes their way. It may be due to this reason that officers do not trust NSFs enough to handle them important tasks. I really wish that NSFs can wake up their ideas, because if you don’t want to be looked down upon by officers, please don’t try to think of slacking your two years by taking MCs or pushing away work.

Yes, you may not get recognition. I know it myself, because there are many instances that I don’t get recognised for going beyond my duties, but I’m sure that most people wish to be respected. There is also potential learning opportunity for taking on extra duties and who knows… maybe some of it will be helpful in future. Since we need to spend the time in office anyway, being willing to go beyond your duties isn’t going to take anything off us anyway right?

Imagine the conversation below:
A: What do you do in NS?
B: I’m a clerk.
A: Clerk… slack right?

We really can’t stop anyone from thinking this way if officers do not trust us enough to hand us important tasks. We may not be able to change everyone, but enough clerks start to be trustworthy, future clerks will likely be handed more important tasks and all clerks will likely gain more respect in future social outings than just the typical “slack right?” response. Yeah, I may be just ranting, but I think I’m ranting with some sense. What do you think?