A Kind of Afterlife

A friend of mine, whom I haven’t seen since university, called me last week and asked me out for slop. Being blokes, we shot the shit about specs and towards the end of our conversation, a thought occurred to me. I asked him if he was peddling insurance. He said yes. I told him I already had insurance and therefore could not help him. He was fine with that but insisted that it wouldn’t hurt to just come out for slop.

Then a few days ago, I ran into an old friend. He left the military last year and is now an insurance agent. The majority of ex-regulars either join some government-linked engineering firm as technicians or become insurance agents. The reasons are simple. Despite whatever achievements you had in the military, nobody ‘outside’ really gives a damn about them. (Welcome to the real world – it sucks!) This is what you get after spending the golden years of your existence serving the nation: your experience and skills are simply non-transferable and your efforts are unrecognized by most prospective employers. The worst part is that you picked up few useful skills (if any) in the military and you are out of touch with the real world. As a regular, you do the same shit every day. You laze around when you get the chance. You are paid to do simple things like attend parades. You soon start to think about how glamorous it is to wear a tie to work, work in Shenton Way and do ‘intelligent’ jobs like office work, but you never realize you have been living like a plant in the greenhouse all the while. The outside world is result-driven and your mistakes can result in a loss of bonuses and in some cases, immediate dismissal from your job and a black mark on your resume. You have to tax your brain to find ways to meet some company objective. When you fall sick and return from illness, you will find a large pile of work on your desk and a hundred unread emails in your mailbox.

Unlike in the military, there is no such thing as taking MC ‘for fun’ or when you ‘don’t feel like going to work’. You have no canteen breaks and you certainly do not get paid a decent salary to stand in some ‘change of command’ parade or attend some ‘pride day’ or ‘army family day’. You can slack and screw up but it is unlikely that you will be sacked. You begin to think that you are too good for the military and that you are getting ripped off and underpaid for contributing so much. This is true for many regulars but there are also those who are paid the same salary for doing a bloody 8 to 5 job which mainly consists of packing parachutes from Monday to Friday in some air-conditioned room, the monotony alleviated by two canteen breaks at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m! It is little wonder that so many regulars cannot even pass their annual physical fitness test!

Where was I? Oh yes the skill relevance. Big government-linked firms are always hiring technicians and unlike their competitors, they recognize to some extent your military experience. An army mechanic can easily land a job as a technician or mechanic in one of these companies as long as he does not talk rubbish in his interview or ask for the sky in his wage demands. For the rest who want to wear a tie, insurance and sales are popular fields to go into. Why? Because they do not require any experience or qualifications! For example, all you need to apply for an insurance job is just four credits in your ‘O’ Levels and to qualify, you just need to pass two computerized tests. If you can make it in sales or insurance, everybody gains. If you can’t sell anything, too bad. The company loses nothing by giving you a try and then dismissing you if necessary, when you fail!

Seriously, if you want to be a military man, you should strive to make it your career. There is no point realizing that you can’t cut it when you are in your late-twenties and then correcting your mistake by going into a different field. You would have lost much precious time and it is always painful to start all over when you are jaded and battling hard to find positives in your wayward existence.