EPTThe last blog ended with me barely getting on the plane to Tucson, Arizona, where I reside today. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, as the last time I had to change locations, no one had given me the time of day, let alone directions as to what was going to happen. This time was slightly different.
I had virtually no idea what I was doing, as I was the only one from my team coming to Tucson. This is likely due to me being a reclass, but to be honest, I don't know. I called up the base I was supposed to be going to and got through to someone at the squadron I am now assigned to. He didn't even know I was coming. I told him the time and day I was supposed to arrive, and that ended our brief talk, besides him praising the base and such.
Getting on the plane and getting off the plane was a pretty smooth endeavor, nothing out of the ordinary. I was in blues, yet again, I had no idea what I was supposed to be wearing, and it would be like me to get yelled at right off the bat for being out of uniform. I played it safe.
The sergeant was there in uniform as well, but he was in ABUs (vs my Blues), so I felt slightly more comfortable. I was the only one to get picked up today (clearly), but it was a special circumstance anyways, since it was a Friday afternoon. This would affect the next couple of days.
We dragged my luggage into his car (which I thought would be more elaborate at the time, not quite expecting a station wagon), paid the airport parking fee, and we were off.
He started talking about various things about the squadron and the base itself. I don't remember exactly what he said; I would learn it in the next coming months anyways. We got the base in about 20 minutes, it was a fairly short ride, and I was able to see the base a few minutes before we got the front gate. I didn't know what I was looking at, but I could see it nonetheless.
He asked if I wanted a tour. I told him sure, I wouldn't remember much anyways. I remember him showing me pretty much the whole base, and I was right, I wouldn't remember half of it. The notable thing I forgot was the location of the squadron. He took me there to see if we could get some inprocessing done, but I suppose I got there too late. I got a brief look of the exterior, and that was enough to at least remind me later.
He showed me the rest of the base, noting the BX, Commissary and Shoppette specifically (especially because I didn't get my meal card yet; I had to pay for the chow hall). I vaguely remembered it.
Finally he drops me off at the dorm. It's about time, I wanted to get in there and take a look around dammit. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was fairly empty. After all, the people who lived here were E3s and below that didn't get housing or food payment; who could afford a car without being flat broke every pay check? There was someone on the balcony that recognized me.
Apparently I was more well known at DLI than I thought. He was another Russian reclass that finished Security Forces tech school sooner than I did. He hadn't gone through the inprocessing stuff yet, and would attend my FTAC (first term Airman center) class with me. It wasn’t important to me at the time, but it was nice to know that I had someone I knew there. I threw my stuff into my room, and was reminded that it was the weekend, don’t do anything stupid. Then the sergeant left.
I dunno about the rest of you, but there’s a real sense of satisfaction when you first get to live on your own. It was a little different for me for a few reasons. I wasn’t aware of it, but because I had never lived on my own before, I didn’t know how few bills I actually had until someone pointed it out to me. Because I was living on a military installation, and in the dorms, I didn’t have to pay for housing, water, electricity, hell, I didn’t have to pay for food (I did anyways). All the military asked of me at the time was to show up to work on time and do my job. It wasn’t actually all that bad. All I had to pay for was my internet (after I got it installed), my cell phone. That was about it.
Anyways, I hadn’t had all this on my mind at the time; I was concerned with setting up an internet connection. I did some asking around and found out that I was able to set up a connection through a guy that did internet through our dorm exclusively. I just had to talk to our dorm manager to get his card and call him up. Of course, it was the weekend, and the dorm manager was hard as shit to get in contact with. I ended up spending a lot of the weekend doing some minor exploring and toying around on my computer.
I only really established where the Burger King, the BX, and the Shoppette was at the end of the weekend. Enough to keep me alive, and stuff. Not much was found out. On Sunday, I realized that I had no idea where the squadron was. I just had a vague description of something along the lines of past the gym. Of course, I had no idea where the damn gym was. I wandered around in the wrong direction and eventually decided to try again in the morning. It was getting dark, and I was starting to not recognize shit.
The next morning, I found someone willing to give me a ride. Go figure, all the effort I went through last night. I got to the squadron and started my inprocessing. A lot of tests to make sure I had a general idea of my job, and paperwork to make a record of yes, in fact, I was there. It was a lot of studying the job until FTAC started a couple weeks later. There were a few other Airmen there that were like me, had just gotten there, and were starting FTAC with me. I think there were about 5-6 others that came with me, and most of us ended up working together all the way to today.
We got there, and FTAC was a LOT of briefings and death by Powerpoint. The specifics are not important, mostly it was there to somewhat introduce the base, and catch us up on annual briefing requirements. The people from the other squadrons we were with would eventually be our friends in the coming years. Lots of us still hang out, and recognize each other.
After FTAC was done and over with, we would go to Bay Orderly. It was essentially details, cleaning the dorm and stuff. We were told that SF wouldn’t have to go due to manning requirements.
Well they made us do it anyways. For 1 week versus 2, because that made so much difference. We were all sent to flight after the week, and my first experience working graveyard shift came to fruitation.
Before I get into that, my life kinda looked like this. My job was going to be law enforcement. Cop stuff. You know, pull people over, give tickets, when you drive next to people, they slow down to aggravatingly slow speeds, stuff like that. My offtime, however, was WoW. I was an addict. As soon as I was able to set up internet, I was on WoW. BC was starting to come to a close at that point, people were scrambling to get the gear they needed to grind easier before Wrath came out. I was one of them. I spent a tremendous amount of time doing nothing but straight up farming and raiding. In a normal day where I spent about 8 hours in briefings, I spent 10 playing WoW, and 6 sleeping. It was kinda sad, in the retrospect. I got along with everyone just fine, but I had no friends. This didn’t help, and it would likely affect the coming year.
When work started, I wasn’t really surprised to find out I was graveyard shift. I had never worked it before, but I didn’t think much of it. For those who don’t know, it is tremendously different than working normal hours. Simply put, my body had issues getting used to it.
In addition to my brain needing to take the information in, I needed to have my body get used to sleeping during the day. It proved to be harder for me than I thought. I got off at about 7 in the morning, would get back to my dorm about 8. I tried going to sleep right after that, but I ended up playing about an hour of WoW to do dailies or something. Eventually, I’d go to sleep about 9-10.
But I’d wake up at 12. And would not go back to sleep. Work started at about 10. I got damn near no sleep.
I did try Melatonin. I tried the tin foil on my window. I tried Tylenol PM. I tried a lot. Eventually I said screw it and forced my body to operate off this sleep deprivation, sticking to my WoW addiction. It was kinda sick, and my body paid for it. I barely ate (I still don’t eat all that much), and pretty much left my dorm to go to work, or get food. I didn’t hang out with anyone, not like I had much to offer to the conversation. People in my job are sports junkies, and could talk hours on end about Sundays game. I could talk hours on end about raiding. Not much in common there.
Work was work. Arming up every day, keeping the base safe, or something like that. Nothing spectacular.
This continued on for about a year. Nothing changing. People deploying now and again, and me hoping that my name would not come up on that list. Wrath came out, and I was like 10th or something on the server to hit 80. Some shit like that. I remember the day it was released I rushed to the post office despite not getting a notification of a package and I asked them flat out if they had anything for me.
They looked at me kinda funny and grabbed the package that had just barely come in about 20m ago. Yeah.
I had gotten an Alienware computer at the time. Yes, I am completely inept at building my own computer, and needed a premade. I wasn’t really concerned about internet pride. As long as I had a halfway decent computer to run WoW and download anime, who cares. This was essentially my life. People came and went out, but as long as I had WoW, I didn’t care. I wasn’t even that good. It wasn’t until the Wrath patch that I even made remotely relevant progress in the raiding scene. I was in a raiding guild at the time, I tried, but in the end, Black Temple was too hard for us before the 30% boss HP nerf. Let alone Sunwell.
About a year or so of this. Pretty damned uneventful. But it was nice. It was a stable lifestyle. Aside from the occasional formation outside of work, this was what I did. It didn’t matter what day it was. Occasionally I’d play some console games here and there, but largely, it was WoW. I got into Guitar Hero at the time, and played Expert after a couple of months. But largely focused on WoW.
When Wrath came out, even more was unchanged in my RL. Ingame though, I left my guild in favor of personal friends I had at the time. The people from high school. The age gap became more and more obvious. I was yelled at because I was too laxidasical about their concerns. Apparently I had no idea how stressful it was to apply for college. And they were right, but it was more and more obvious that I was less important in their lives. I was just that one Mage.
I eventually met her. Snowfruit. She was a the sister of a guildie. I found out that this guildie was apparently in my English class. I don’t remember him at all. But it meant that Snowfruit lived in my hometown. I didn’t think much of it until later, but this is the first occurance of me noticing a girl gamer. I had run into them before, but most of them were arrogant stuck up bitches that got free gear. The ones that weren’t, straight up sucked anyways. She was different. She was actually good at the game, and earned the shit that she had. Or at least it seemed like it.
We all grouped together to run basic heroics. That and Naxx 10 would be about all we were able to do. The group, for reference.
Snorlax: Main tank, younger brother of main healer and other pally dps. Tauren Warrior.
Sunsun: Pally healer. More or less leader of the group by default due to age.
Deathise: Oldest of the 3 brothers. He was only really concerned with PvP and raided because that’s how you got weapons before PvP weapons at the time. Ret Pally/DK
Chikyu: Druid healer. He would be a close friend.
Loracaryn: Rogue. Very good listener and close friend.
Shuukuen: Ele Shammy. Convinced him to be ele purely because Enh sucked at the time. And he hates healing.
Snowfruit: Priest healer. She was shy about doing anything as a group, I had to eventually convince her that she was better than 90% of healers I ran with (and she was).
Me: Mage. Fire was op at the time.
The last spot was kinda up in the air. A lot of times it would be a pug, or just someone we happened to know. Anyways, as we went on in our career, we would barely progress past Naxx 10. We wanted to do more, but due to my schedule being inconvenient (working nights) to college schedules. Essentially, Snorlax ran things being the main tank, and Sunsun was up there pretty much to keep peace. This broke down really fast.
Deathise had an issue of taking too many weapons. To be perfectly fair, he didn’t have any competition. He was the only 2H user at the time, and I didn’t have a problem with it. I did agree he got too much gear, but that’s just how shit dropped.
Snorlax was extremely defensive about his tanking position, but it fell apart when he got a girlfriend. He had a girlfriend prior to me leaving high school, but it became a real issue as we started to try raiding seriously. Raids would be cancelled week after week because he wouldn’t log on. He would be out with her. And as a result, we didn’t have a tank at all.
I offered to go tank. I had nothing better to do but level alts anyways. They wanted me to stay DPS. Something about me being the highest of them. I told them it didn’t matter if we didn’t have a tank, DPS is dime a dozen.
It didn’t happen. He continued to not log on, and we continued to skip raids. We had conquered Naxx 10 eventually (because that’s so hard /sarcasm), and OS (same thing). We tried Eye of Eternity (high end at the time), but failed for various reasons. We tried once and lost harshly. Snorlax never logged on in time for that again.
Amidst all this drama going on. I got the notification that I was deploying. I deployed early February 2009.
