Dulloldfart
Squirrel Extraordinaire
Q1: Where did you go for your RPF?
Q2: Had you wanted to blow the RPF, how difficult would it have been to do so?
Q3: Is it true what they say about not being able to vote?
Q4: And I believe you said in another post, that you were not aware of any a) pole running program, b) nose pushing of small objects such as peanuts or pencils.
Q5: What other pertinent RPF issues do you care to shed light on?
1. PAC in Los Angeles, where I was based anyway.
2. If I had wanted to leave covertly while on the RPF it would have been next to impossible. During the day I was always in a group or at least with one other person, and at night there was a person on watch in the hallway, quite apart from the CCTV cameras and 24/7 surveillance from the security guards. If I hadn't minded doing it openly it would have been easy enough, as we were often working outside, and approaching someone on the street who looked like a non-Scio and asking them to call 911 because I was being held against my will would probably have been successful.
3. There was no obvious prohibition against voting. I was an alien (i.e. not a US citizen), and also not very interested in the process, so I'm not the best person to ask about the possibility, though.
4. Correct. Although we did get to run everywhere, as is standard in the RPF. At the time I was 45 and although not athletic it wasn't a problem for me and after six months of the hard labour I was in great shape (see pic, taken in the UK a few weeks after I "graduated" the RPF). The schedule was very arduous at the end of my stay, but I didn't see any capricious physical punishment akin to peanut-pushing.
5. I'll just copypasta a post I made in October 2004, from my online indexed archive at http://www.fzglobal.org/writings.htm:
I was in the PAC RPF for several months in 1996. To start with, it was
miserable indeed on a daily basis. There are different aspects to
life in the RPF: sleeping and toilet/shower arrangements; work;
eating; study.
In the RPF the main men's dorm contained about 45 men in three-high
bunks, crammed together. There was just enough space between the
bunks to stand. I was in a top bunk, with my head about six inches
from a noisy ventilation outlet pipe.
Work was not fun. I was assigned to the "mudding" unit, the unit
responsible for throwing up stud-and-track walls and plastering them.
I wasn't very good at it at all, and it was very messy.
The showers after work were OK, but at night there was one men's
bathroom to use for about twenty guys at a time all trying to clean
their teeth, use the toilet etc. at the same time. It was very
degrading and dehumanizing.
The RPF food was the same as the rest of the crew, and was decently
prepared and presented. Eating it was a hassle, as the space was
cramped and if someone walked by you had to shuffle your chair around
to make room. With a hundred RPFers or so, there was a long chow line
to actually get the food onto one's plate, so there wasn't much time
to eat it. It was barely tolerable, but could have been worse.
A year ago I was reading about conditions in a US prison, and I was
thinking how luxurious it sounded by comparison, in terms of freedom
to make phone calls, etc. That's not the whole story, as I would fear
for my life in a US prison, but didn't in the RPF.
Study was frustrating. The buzzword was working towards "Redemption".
It went fine for a couple of weeks, then I went into session with my
twin. My twin had a tight needle with a high TA and I was unable to
overcome it. It was all my fault, of course, but I couldn't fix it.
I'm not a wimpy kind of guy, but I was literally in tears several
times over a couple of months, frustrated at making no progress.
All this changed radically the day after LRH's birthday, when I wrote
a request to route out. I was assigned to the RPF's RPF, as was
normal when an RPFer wanted to leave instead of being with the
redemption program.
The RPF's RPF is supposed to be even more miserable than the RPF, but
in my case everything was an immediate upgrade. There were only half
a dozen or so of us, mostly girls, with myself and another guy being
the only men. The other guy was Jamie Didcoate, 20 year-old son of
ex-UK long-term SO members Richard and Kathy Didcoate, currently on
the PAC RPF per RPF Insider. Since single men and women cannot share
the same room, Jamie and I were the only people in the bedroom. Now,
only two people in a room is a luxury I had not had in the previous 23
years in the SO! For most of the time I was in PAC I had been in a
dorm in Lebanon Hall (room 617), initially with 8-11 other guys and
then 5-8 after we tossed out one of the 3-bed bunks one day.
When I started there, the RPF's RPF ate before the regular RPF, but
from the same food. We only had 20 minutes to eat instead of 30, but
with no waiting this didn't add up to less time actually eating, and
being there first we got the pick of the food, as much to eat of the
best stuff as we wanted.
The work was hard and messy, but the person in charge of the RPF's RPF
was Sylvia Grout, who I had known from the UK twenty years earlier.
She was in-valence and a decent person, an auditor, unlike some of the
sadists who had senior positions in the regular RPF. She wasn't soft,
but she was fair.
We spent a day in the famous Rats' Alley once, which was memorable.
It isn't an alley, but a space about 60 feet by 50 under the kitchens,
with hot water pipes running through it so it was hot. The ceiling
was about five feet high, but there were beams hanging down a foot or
so and with the water-pipes that were too hot to touch you couldn't
walk around in there, but got around lying face-down on makeshift
wheeled boards. I didn't see any rats, but there were plenty of those
giant cockroach-like creatures called "Palmetto Bugs". Palmetto Bugs
are remarkable insects. One is two or three inches long, armored so
it doesn't squish easily, and it can *fly* for God's sake! The day I
was there, the walls of Rats Alley were full of them. When I say
"full", I mean pretty much every available inch of wall-space was
covered with them--there must have been tens of thousands of them.
Fortunately they didn't move around much, but they were certainly
alive.
We had to brush up the stagnant water and some dead bugs on the floor,
maybe an inch or two deep in large puddles. We had a hose and washed
the floor down with fresh water, and pushed the resulting mixture down
a drain. Pushing your way around, you had to travel under many of
these beams covered in Palmetto bugs, twitching away a few inches
above your head. I was very uncomfortable to begin with, but after
about twenty minutes of running "Hellos and OKs" silently on the bugs
while I was working it became tolerable (I was very glad I knew that
bit of tech!).
We went back in there a month or so later for a couple of hours and
there wasn't one bug in sight. The floor was covered with white
powder, supposedly safe for humans, but I was glad to be away from it.
Since I was routing out, I had to get a Leaving Sec Check. This I got
from Sylvia, who was a decent auditor. I was allowed extra sleep to
be sessionable, so this was fine.
Life was grand (by comparison) for about a month. Then I finished my
sec check and was in waiting mode, waiting to be allowed to leave. It
eventually took about six weeks from sec-check completion to getting
out of the door. More on this later.
Suddenly conditions changed. There was some purge or other and over
the space of a week the RPF's RPF swelled in size to fifty or so and
life became a bit of a nightmare again. But the berthing was OK still
as Jamie and I had to be segregated from the others since we were
leaving and a possible bad influence. It was more tolerable though as
there was light at the end of the tunnel, and in a few weeks or so I
knew I would be out of there, free at last. Jamie used to joke about
it being like the Hotel California, in that you could check out but
could never leave, and at times it seemed like that was really true.
There were some who had expressed a wish to leave, but were told that
if they left they would be declared, even though the policy was that
if you routed out properly you could do that and wouldn't be declared.
At the time it seemed important.
One stop on leaving was what the RPF Insider calls the $500 "severance
pay". It's not really severance pay, although that might be the spin
put on it. When you leave they demand that you sign a waiver, which
basically says you are signing this of your own free will (hah!), you
are a real bad-ass and the decent, hard-working, considerate people in
the CofS have bent over backwards trying to help you but you have
refused their help and it's all your own fault and not theirs, and you
will not breathe a word of what you have observed during your time in
the SO, including posting to the Internet. Because you are giving up
a valuable right, you have to be compensated with a valuable
consideration, i.e. the $500, presumably the least they felt they
could get away with. Getting $500 on some org's FP for this is almost
impossible. The worst crime you can commit in the SO is to leave it,
and no-one in the SO cares a hoot about someone leaving as long as
they don't create a PR flap. I wrote a letter to RTC saying I didn't
care about getting $500 cash--and I didn't--and if they packaged up a
pile of dog shit and said it was worth $500 I would have agreed to it.
Eventually I got a couple of second-hand KTL books, which they
considered were equivalent in value. My dog-shit idea didn't fly. I
didn't need the money as I had some credit cards available and I could
live off those until I got a job etc.
I eventually got out after working straight through a couple of days
and nights with the others and collapsing. They knew I had high blood
pressure, and I had joked that the way I could get out of there was to
overdo the work and have a heart attack, and I sometimes made a show
of working extra-hard as if I was actively pursuing that goal. I
wasn't stupid enough to really do that, but they could probably have
believed that I was. They probably decided to get rid of me quick in
case I really did have a heart attack or something.
I've been enjoying reading the RPF Insider's newsletters. They each
ring true. I have a hard time believing that they are actually
written by someone on the RPF, as the amount of time you have to
yourself to write something like that longhand is virtually nil.
There is no time when you are alone. Maybe someone close to the RPF,
like in PAC Renos or whatever they call the non-RPF Estates
construction guys these days. Unless it is one of those chronically
sick people who just lie in bed all day and are allowed to do nothing.
I guess we'll find out sooner or later.
Paul