Well, that was unexpected.
Let's start with the obvious fun... Since the meeting was set up for 9:00 AM in a different town, I got to enjoy the rare pleasure of waking up at seven in the morning for a long drive along dark winter roads, helping my granddad keep an eye out for wandering moose so that we wouldn't have any special surprises at 60 kilometers per hour.
When we were there, we had a little touch of confusion dealing with which direction to go in. Sure, there were clear signs point out what was where... But there were two things that looked like they might be what I was looking for, and they were in different directions.
Once I made my way into the building, more confusion arose from an utter lack of signs, compounded by plenty of poor direction-giving abilities (that, or poor direction-
taking abilities...).
Then, finally, I made my way to a promising area, which contained a desk, a small waiting area, and a healthy number of similarly-aged people.
Now it was the military's turn to be confused.
You see, nobody in that room was actually supposed to be there. Yes, that was indeed the place where people should meet up for their military orientation/interview... The only problem was that there wasn't supposed to
be any orientation that day.
They'd sent out (or thought they had sent out) letters to each of the chaps in that room some time ago, telling them not to meet up that day because the orientation had been canceled.
Now they had around 17-18 people there, from many different places in Norway, all of them ready (to some extent) for their examination. Well, so much for calling off the orientation...
We waited for a while as personnel scrambled to set up an examination for us, then got straight into the action with one of those lovely military recruiting videos (those things are always hilarious).
We went through a written quiz, a vision/hearing test, a cursory physical/psychological examination from the one doctor they managed to pull into service on such short notice, and finally an interview with an officer, where the final decision was made whether to take us in or kick us out.
I ended up getting ranked far higher than I had expected, but I suspect this may have been because of the hacked-together nature of the whole deal. The physical examination ended at a stethoscope check, a blood pressure test, and an external examination of my spine.
No running, no jumping, no pushups, nothin'. Not even a urine test.
And my hearing and vision (both of which I know are not perfect) both got top marks for some reason.
The written test, of course, was a bit more difficult to pass than the physical.
The test was broken up into three different categories, each to be taken separately. The first was a mathematics test, which went so-so... I didn't quite understand a few of the questions, and some of them I simply didn't have time to work out.
The second was a pattern recognition test, which I pretty much aced. Out of 36 questions, only the last three gave me any real difficulty in figuring out. And I ended up solving one of those three before the timer finished.
The third section of the test, however, was a word similarities test... Each problem was one base word, and then a field of six other words. You had to pick the word which meant the same as the base word.
Now, as a person who's known as something of a walking thesaurus, you may think I had an easy time with this test.
Well, the test was of course in Norwegian.
I think I may have answered half of them correctly... If I was lucky.
Once everything was said and done however, I found that my total ranking for the written test was 6 (out of 9), which isn't so bad. 4 is the minimum to get in, and I think 5 qualifies you for basic officer training.
So with that, and the cursory physical exam which placed me at near-perfect for some peculiar reason, there weren't many numbers that shouted for my being pushed out of service...
Then came the interview with the officer, and I think I actually ended up impressing him somehow. Again, not very conducive to getting yourself booted out.
Everything was tallied up, a couple items were discussed, and I have now been officially declared capable of service. So from the looks of things, there's a fair chance I'll get called in for service in August. Woo.
Well, like I said, it'll be an experience either way... And with any luck, I'll get into the communications battalion, where I can tool around with old military radios from the sixties and more modern communication devices, not to mention the snazzy division symbol they get:
And if I end up in the engineer battalion instead, then there's an even snazzier badge in the works:
So, as you can see, it all works out. By the way, I'd just like to note that the weird differences in image ratios is the military's fault, not mine.
Like I always say; "If you can blame it on the army, go ahead and do it".
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Topic: Sandy Fjord (Read 96268 times)