*Zzzzz-SNRKKKTTT* AAARGH!!

One of the perks of becoming a clerk in the army is doing Ops duty instead of the regular guard duty. What this means (at least in my case) is that instead of staring blankly into the night sky at 3 am in the morning with a rifle slung over your shoulder, I get to sit in the air-conditioned office, play Xbox games all day and go to bed (and wake up) at hours that vaguely resemble the sleep cycles of civilised humans. Of course, it's a pretty sweet deal.....until you realise that for some strange reason, every single Duty Officer that I've ended up doing duty with SNORES like he's got a built-in Dolby 5.1 setup in his nasal cavity >_<"

Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm a notoriously light sleeper. Unless I'm falling-asleep-on-my-feet tired, I have a hard time falling asleep and staying in dreamland because even moderately loud noises can pull me back into semi-consciousness, which means that I can be kept awake by the sound of the TV downstairs or the way-too-loud music of some idiot sitting on the opposite side of the train blasting his tunes through his earphones as if they were disco speakers (but that one's a rant for another time). It also means that once the DO starts snoring, I'm going to get very, very annoyed as I try to slip into unconsciousness -_-" It seems to me that there's something very wrong with our officer selection criteria and medical benefits when we have these (supposedly) capable men who are in charge of the smooth running of millions of dollars worth of military equipment, and we can't be bothered to get them a cure for sounding like they've got miniature rock concerts in their throats at night T_T"

Oh, and before you put it down to bad luck on my part, I checked with one of my colleaugues who's been a clerk for a lot longer than I have, and he assures me that he's got the same problem too. Which, of course, means that my unit's either awash in snoring officers, or the country's experiencing a nasty first taste of the flaws of having a limited gene pool...

As for me, I've started using the same solution that my colleaugue came up with on his own: upon hearing the first tortured syllables that indicate that the DO's a snorer, we pick up the mattress, move the whole lot (pillow and all) to the far side of the office and sleep on the floor. Of course, in my case I usually end up having to pile the blanket on my head and hope that the ringing of my tinnitus is enough to drown out the background sound effects, but it's a helluva lot better than trying to control my irritation at being kept awake, and since neither of us are willing to wake up the DO to tell him "Sir, please stop snoring so I can sleep", it'll have to do for the next 5 1/2 months until I leave the army for good -_-"