A Day At COT

Well.

It’s been a while! Blog posting takes lots of time and I have not had a lot of time until tonight!

If you are my facebook friend you may have seen lots of pictures of all the craziness that’s been going on.  It’s now training day 15 and I haven’t blogged since day 0. So a lot has happened!

We had 3 written exams. One was all questions from the OTSMAN. One was 2 weeks later of questions from our many, many hours of lecture on the Air Force, leadership, teambuilding, professionalism, etc. and then the next one was a week later from more lecture.

The first 2 weeks of class were insane. Here’s a typical day:

0430 – official wake up time. There may or may not be someone in the hallway screaming at you to wake up. We’re officially not allowed to wake up before that time but I will leave it to your imagination whether people actually got up before or not.

0435 – line up outside your door, fully dressed (Either in PT gear or ABUs) and ready to go (so you might imagine that people would want to give themselves more than 5 minutes)

0440 – leave the dorms, line up outside, and march to the drill pad to learn how to march or to do PT (usually it’s PT. Drill was only the first couple of days)

0500 – start PT/Drill

0600: finish PT/drill, kill time marching while we wait for the flights before us to go to the dfac for breakfast

0635: march over to the Dfac, the flight leader has to report in “Sir/Ma’am, November Flight reports with a dining priority of 0635. We arrived at 0635”. If we were on time, we go in. If we’re late, technically they can send us away with MREs, but I’ve never seen it happen. Usually there’s enough of a backup to get in the dfac that even if you were 10 minutes late you could still enter the building with the rest of the people with the same dining priority as you.

0700: get back to the dorm to shower and change

0745: line up outside our rooms with our flight to go to class

0800-1300 – lecture either in the flight room or the auditorium. Struggle to stay awake while taking notes in class, struggle even more to stay awake in the auditorium. If people are falling asleep they’re supposed to get up and go stand in the back. It’s funny to watch the numbers go up as the day goes on.

1305: lunch. We line up outside in 2 columns, then file in one by one. We wait along one wall and two-by-two go up to get a tray. Then we turn and grab plates and salad bar stuff, moving down the line side-stepping and looking  straight ahead. (Hence it took a week to discover a rack of cereal at breakfast, a big rotating display of grapes and yogurt and milk at breakfast, and an assortment of cakes at lunch and dinner) Every time you step, you have to bring your heels back together, feet at 90 degrees. You slide down the line and get to the meal where someone puts way too much of some way too cooked meat or vegetable on your plate (there are always a few different meats and a few different vegetables and starches but there is a high rate of repetition) or you can skip that part and make yourself a sandwich. There’s a metal box that supposedly has corn bread in it but never does, a cookie stand, multiple freezers of ice cream, drink machines, coffee machine, milk machine, and if you were brave enough to look around, there was a soft-serve ice cream machine behind you (there is a lot of ice cream in this place. And the meal costs the same regardless of what you get so….). so then you pay and go eat.

I’m going to write a separate post on dining procedure but eventually (and by that I mean really quickly) the food gets in.

Then we go re-line up outside and once our whole flight is out, we march back over to the academic building.

1400-1800: more lecture. In the flight room or in the auditorium. Some days we have an hour set aside for our Flight Commander to deal with logistical isssues, and/or for our flight members to do the various extra jobs we were assigned (every flight has a logistical officer, finance, academic, photo, administrative, safety, standardization, etc)

1815: dinner. Same deal as lunch, exactly.

1900: get back to the dorm. Think “yey I have 4 hours until lights out to get classwork done” and then realize you need to spend 3 hours doing a million other things – writing reports, filling out paperwork, making lists of this and emailing them to that person, going to a meeting, going outside and practicing drill, etc. until a week goes by and you still haven’t studied a thing.

2300: lights out. Hope that tomorrow I’ll get something done.