My Bad Covid Romance – 2

Welcome back everyone and good morning, good day and good evening around the globe!

I felt a little strange before my first get-together with Matze in absence of Nadine on the next Tuesday. Not that I was nervous or anything, I mean we had known each other for years now. It was just this sense you sometimes get, this feeling that something has happened before but not in a déja-vu kind of way. It’s hard for me to explain this right in English and maybe this even is a personal thing of mine but don’t you sometimes get this situation in your life when something happens and you think you have dreamed about it before? I mean, not in a way like you fantasize about it and want it to become true, not day dreaming, but you actually believe that you have had a dream when you were younger and now you remember it and see those things again happening in reality ?

Anyway he arrived at my place around 1PM. We hugged like we always did for greetings and chattet a little about what was going on in our lives. I told him about my appointments with the Arbeitsamt (which best translates to labor bureau I think). My responsible official had put me into a procedure were I needed to “learn” how to write a curriculum vitae and how best to “act” in job interviews. Not that I would be invited to any of those with the pandemic dragging on.

Honestly this is just some kind of scheme by the government were they force you to be physically present at some location at a specific time to weed out the more undisciplined unemployed and cut their monthly payments. I don’t have a problem with this per se, but I hate to be forced to do things that just waste my time and where I am sitting around bored to death.

He told me about the time when he had been unemployed some years back himself, directly after his military service in the Bundeswehr and before he got into his first job at the Airport in Frankfurt. This drew a remark from me that I felt sorry for him having to waste his time on compulsory military service before it was abolished. Like I had to waste my time now at the Arbeitsamt.

I had heard that he had served from Nadine, when she told me about it at the beginning of their relationship. It had been a peculiar thing, since most men in Germany would not be doing it any more even before compulsory military service was abolished in 2011. It had become very easy to get exempted due to medical reasons back in the day and if that failed, the vast majority would opt to do the alternative civilian service instead.

I had known this about him in the back of my head, but we had never actually talked about it in the years afterwards. It was kind of intriguing to do so now. The military in Germany doesn’t hold much influence over our society and normally when people talk about the Bundeswehr it’s in a very condescending way. Like how useless it is to still spend money on an army when you have nothing but friendly neighbors around you and how stupid the people are who join the military service in modern times.