reservist for most of it I will admit. BUT You will laugh at this. In Toronto at the time we had a co-op placement at our school where we could join the army... wait for it... for credits and no money!!! Yeah I think I must have been brain dead because I could have gotten money to do my QL2. But thats only half of it. At the time QL2 didn't take that long to complete. Not long at all if I remember, I think it was a month, maybe a month and a half if you put it all together. But get this. Not only did we not get paid but we would have to go to "work" which was going to Moss Park every day 12:00-1700 hours monday to friday for 5 months on, to do our QL2 with I believe it was four training weekends. YES can you say over kill. It was so bad that they ran out of things to do for the QL2 course almost half way threw and had to slow it down to like one in class course a day (about 30-45 minutes ish) and then the rest was mind numbing running, push-ups, rifle drill, push-ups, running, push-ups, rifle drill, push-ups, push-ups, 50 more pushups, 49.. no your doing it wrong start again 50 push ups... running pushups, more push-ups and yes..... push-ups. Then for the last hour we'd do PT... which consisted of.... yes.... push-ups....
So yeah my life was the army for 5 months and a bit when I did my QL2 and I made a few hundred dollars for a few weekend outers and thats it.
You would be surprised that the worst part of my army xp wasn't the push-ups... it was kinda kewl showing off to my friends how I could do one armed push-ups, in fact 50 of them in a row. But what bugged me was the drill. Being in Cadets before joining the army and teaching drill myself as a NCO in cadets, felt kind of odd getting re-trained basic drill again. You rarely get compliments during QL2 I got a lot for my drill oh and polishing too.
I think the funnist thing I did in the Forces was when we got our uniform we were told to polish our combats. So being a SGT in Air cadets we usta make everyone polish there boots like made and we all had our tricks. Well I spent a better part of my weekend making base coasts all around the combats. Then I polshed then really well. I came in on monday and they were yelling at ppl because they wern't polished. The guy comes up to me and says.. "are those parade boots" I say no Mcpl! He says "I've never seen combat boots like that......." "what did you do" I then explained to him I was told to polish them and I was in cadets so I knew how... He then ordered me to scuff them up and not to polish them for a few weeks as combats can not be that shinny. I didn't get yelled at but it was kind of funny in retro spect.
Ahhh CAF and Cadet memories.
