(05/14/06)
I can only start by saying that this was the strangest Friday of my life. A recap, from the afternoon onward:
2:40 PM - A doctor shows up from the clinic to talk to our class and give us a briefing on chicken pox. Apparently my squad leader contracted chicken pox, and has been contagious for the last few days. The doctor basically tries to scare us into believing that we might all get chicken pox again, despite our vaccinations and any previous instance of having chicken pox.
3:40 PM - Having gotten the briefing for all my squad leader's classmates, I have to attend a nearly identical briefing on chicken pox for the people in her squad. Boring, except the part where "If any of you get chicken pox, we'll probaby have to quarantine you in your room, the way we did your squad leader." So that's where she's been all day.
6 PM - I go to dinner.
7 PM - Apparently I'm not allowed to go back to my barracks room because there is a bomb threat affecting my building. I wonder to myself which would take precedence, if there were a chicken pox quarantine and a bomb threat in the same building.
8:30 PM - I'm still not allowed back in the barracks. I decide to go find some friends. I'm not allowed to walk through the bomb threat area, which means that I have to walk around, effectively turning a 15 minute walk into a 45 minute walk to the bar.
9:15 PM - I arrive at the bar, order a pitcher, and start talking to acquaintances. I finish my first pitcher fairly quickly, but the bar closes at 10, I'm poor, and I have to work in the morning, so I take it easy and just chat with the people around me.
10:10 PM - We leave. I decide to go to the next bar with everyone because I don't know whether my barracks are cleared from the bomb threat.
10:15 PM - I complain that the group walks too slow. One of my friends agree, and we walk faster, ahead of everyone. While we talk about random stuff, my friend explains one of the things he used to do in high school was jump onto the hood of a car, then run across the roofs of cars parallel parked on the street. I decide this is funny and a good thing to try.
10:17 PM - I choose a car to start at. I step on the bumper, then chicken out and jump off. I do it again, jumping off before I put my full weight on, again. I decide to walk away.
10:18 PM - Too late. A cop car arrives on the scene. I am scared. This dialogue transpires:
Cop - "Are those cars that you're
jumping on yours?"
Me - "No, sir; they are not."
Cop - "Then why are you jumping on them?"
Me - "I .. don't know. This question confuses me,
sir.
Cop - "Sit down on that curb and give me your ID."
10:25 PM - I am cuffed and told that I am under arrest. I look back at my friend, who is being let go. I hop into the cop car just in time for the rest of the group to catch up and see me enter the back seat of a cop car. How embarassing.
10:50 PM - I am given the opportunity to make a few phone calls. Normally, the first call I would make would be to my squad leader. Unfortunately, I'm confused as to whether I should call the chicken pox patient or not. I see a sign that says "All phone calls made from this facility will be monitored." Out of spite, I call my girlfriend and speak mostly in Chinese. As for notifying the people of the Army, I decide to ultimately call my friend Mike, who is in my squad and who was going to give me a ride to a training event in the morning. The voicemail can be downloaded here. The transcript goes something like this (text and audio of the city removed):
Me: "Hey, Mike...I am, uh, currently
in some sort of law enforcement facility, uh... I guess [city] Municipal,
uh..."
Cop: "City Jail."
Me: "City Jail! That's where I'm at. Just basically,
let the...people know. Um, If I don't make it to uh, formation in the
morning. Just yeah. Yeah. Just call me back some other time."
11 PM - I'm fingerprinted and photographed, and I take a look at the name tags on each of the police officers, just in case I need to remember them for whatever reason. I find it a bit ironic that one of the officer's names is Miranda, and yet they did not read me any rights at all. I keep this to myself, so that I increase the likelihood that any statements I make be excluded from legal proceedings. It doesn't matter anyway, because the only question that was asked of me the whole time was "where did you have your last alcoholic beverage?", and at no point in time did they breathalyze me or even ask how many drinks I'd had.
11:10 PM - I'm escorted into an empty cell and wait there for a while.
12:00 AM - I am picked up and sign my outprocessing paperwork. Basically, the police from the installation I'm at picked me up to take me back to my company and sign me over to them. I try to be friendly to them, but they don't seem like they want to talk. I ask what happened with the bomb threat, and as expected, it was nothing.
12:25 AM - I am released from my company area after my platoon sergeant is notified. I am told that they will want to talk to me in the morning when I go to the training event I was scheduled for.
1:00 AM - I crawl into bed, completing one of the more interesting days I've experienced in a while.
