MadProf's
Workshop

Didn’t do a lot of work today, really. Moved a bit of water, checked a few levels, sounded a few tanks, and finished off the Pusan i-night review DVD.

It was raining today, so not so busy. It’s rainy season here, and rain does have a certain charm.

I’m probably doing AV for a programme on Tuesday. The AV head went today and talked in strong terms to Personnel, and said she sped things up a bit. She wants me full-time in AV so she can release me to make more programme videos, and media clips for our use on board.

Now I have an e-day to organise….

Today has been quite good.

The new Waterman is away on overnight, and will be back Tuesday. The other Waterman is doing most of the work at the moment.

So I’m working to get non-essential but good things done, such as the Waterman’s bible, and writing a proper Waterman entry to the Ship Board Operations Procedures Manual (basically ISO 9000 for ships). And I’m getting the keys updated from piles of paperwork to be integrated into the ship’s main database, and hopefully making the new lifeboat’s training videos with the Captain soon.

Maybe also working with IT to get a couple of databases done.

Oh, and I’m trying to actually get to the bottom of the whole water chlorination deal, and get a proper procedure written down, and perhaps (the Captain is backing) to get an inline automatic chlorination system added. I’m aiming to leave my mark on the Waterman job!

Life is:

• frustrating.
• tiring.
• confusing.
• wearying.
• long.
• too short.
• too fast.
• too slow.
• too bizarre.
• too boring.
• too random.
• too inane.
• etc. etc. ad nauseum.

I saw the personnel manager today. He asked me about jobs and extending and all that, but started from ground up, as if he knew nothing at all about what I would like to do. We had an 8 minute conversation, maybe, so I tried to explain the kinds of things, just answering his questions, rather than saying anything directly about our (and my dept. head’s and others) past conversations as I was just so puzzled.

He told me that it’s all very complicated, and that video isn’t really a full time job, and that all the manning problems are causing so much confusion.

The new Waterman has started. He’s learning fast. I taught him the sounding and basic rounds on day 1, then the other Waterman watched him do them on day 2. Today he wasn’t workign with us, tomorrow he’s on e-day, Saturday we will work together again, I guess. So I’ll keep them updated about how he’s doing, and hinting that I’m redundant…

So that’s good. But I’m still feeling very frustrated, making me want to leave the ship, even though I still feel it’s the right place. Every day people ask, ‘So what’s happening?’ and all I can respond is, ‘If you find out, let me know!’ And that just makes them think I"m being funny or secretive or something.

It’s weird. usually, I can *feel* how the dynamics of the place are, and can fit in. But right now, I feel on a different wavelength, like I expect gravity to be normal, and all mass to attract each other, and apples to fall to the ground, and so on, and yet I’m living in a universe where in fact things don’t do that, but almost. And there are no rules written down, but in fact it’s something like things attract each other depending on how blue their colour is, and that’s why apples fall towards the earth.

I feel like I’m in a computer programme I’m trying to debug, and everything ALMOST works,except that there is some wretched buffer overflow error, and extra 0s and 1s get dumped into random data structures.

Right now, I want to do video and AV stuff, and maybe study and get my deck officers ticket in a few years. It takes 2 years or so. 6 months study, and 9 months on a ship, and then a few months study, then an exam. I think.

My idea currently is do AV until either mid 2008, or maybe 2010, on Doulos, then perhaps
work with the company’s TV/video group in the UK, and then either study as a deck officer, or go do AV on Logos Hope, or come work with dad, or all of the above, in some random order.

The AV team would like me to work with them.

But does the dept. head? I dunno.

I was just doing video editing all today so far, pretty much. It’s a project that the half-time video guy recorded 5 months ago, a backstage i-night video showing what goes into making i-night happen. But he never edited it, and doesn’t have time to, for sure.

I’d like to record my own footage and make a better one., I need to record some interviews anyway. I finished the music track I chose, and it works quite well, but at the end, it feels like it’s just the introduction to a whole big project. So I’ll try recording interviews,and add footage from this current i-night of the actual dances and all that,and try and make a full documentry of inight. But this means its a bit of a bigger project.

Life is tiring and frustrating.

The half e-days doing puppets with children were moderately rubbish. Unresponsive kids, then loud and random.

Then the water got messed up. The water people don’t bring anything like what we ask. Like totally different amounts. We ask for 200, they bring 36, etc. so I’ve no idea how much we have on board. Their barge only comes with random amounts of water in it.

Also I spoke with Personnel about doing half video and half deck, after being told so many times by the video boss he wants me, and my boss OK-ed it, and personnel said it sounded fine.

But today My boss had a meeting with Personnel, and they have a videographer coming in the next preship. So it looks like they don’t want me in video.

So I have no idea any more at all what is happening.

Very frustrating.

There’s little stuff on top too. Like I got a key request, but the cabin number and key number on the request don’t match, so I don’t know which they really need, and then the personnel secretary was in meetings all afternoon, so I couldn’t call her and ask which it really was. Just silly little stuff like that. Feels like the last straw when life is frustrating anyway.

Also, I’m SO tired.

Seawatch was so long and tiring, and then yesterday after prayer night I went by the keyshop, and found a water sample had gone positive, so I had to start doing re-tests on all the water until midnight. Then I was up this morning at 6am to get all the valves ready for when the water arrived while I was out.

We will have a new waterman next week! I’ll be speaking with Personnel tomorrow about doing half time video and deck training (teaching new people, teaching Efficient Deck Hand course to current deckies, doing lifeboats sometimes, etc.

This is OK with both the second mate, and the videographer’s boss. So maybe I start in a week or two… Even better than AV, I think. I still get time outside, playing with ropes. And I’ll still be doing AV for i-nights. If I do stay in deck, then I can apply for my AB ticket in February, since I’m still signed on under articles, still a deck rating, and still lifeboat 1 coxswain.

I can still hang out in AV, and mix video for them sometimes too.

I have three crazy days ahead.

The next two days are half e-days when I’m doing a puppet thing for six-year-olds, and half water loading and other work. Then there’s the i-night the day after.

Last port (Pohang, South Korea), I went with a team to stay away from the ship for almost 2 weeks, living with local families, and working with them (doing programmes at schools, church meetings, etc, etc).

During a 2 year stay on Doulos, most people will go out for 3 teams like this. Some, like here, being very civilised, others (say in PNG or parts of North Africa), being much more out-back “jungle teams”. I was staying on my own with a family of four, and every day going to work with my team from 9am until late at night. I really enjoyed living with a family, again. They were so hospitable to me, and looked after me so well, also, they were very relaxed and friendly.
I was introduced to the father like this:

“Daniel, This is Elder Shim. You will be staying at his house.”

So I was a bit worried about how formal I would have to be. We’d been warned that Korean culture is very formal, and that on past visits of the ship, many westerners had caused problems, and had problems, due to the very low-context, low formal nature of the west, and also of the ship.

But I found it totally the opposite. Very easy to get along with, very friendly, very family. The parents sitting on my bed talking (even though I don’t speak Korean, and they don’t speak English!!), and the kids running around, doing a bit of puppetry with them.

It was one of the kids birthday while I was there, here is a photo.

One day she made kim-pap, kind of rolled seaweed paper with rice and crab and carrots and cucumber inside. I’d wondered how it was made. Now I know. They treated us so well, we went out for Korean barbecue 3 or 4 times, had much traditional food. So good. SOOO good! Anyway. A really good time. Really nice people.

Now I’m back on the ship, and have been for a week or two. Usual stressful running around, busy life.

My first love work wise is still theatre and performance/art. I’ve been working with the videographer on board quite a bit, recently in my spare time, and also helping some with the AV/technical/sound/video people in our on board programmes team. I’ve applied for a couple of different jobs, on board, but at the moment it looks like I’ll probably be staying in the deck department for a while.

We’ve just arrived in Pohang, South Korea! These last few days have been very hectic for me, and kind of typify my whole life at present:

23:45 - 04:00am sea-watch.
07.30 - 08:30am study groups.
09:00 - 11:45am Korea country orientation. (basic history lessons, culture, language, etc)
11:45 - 16:00pm sea-watch
19:30 - 22:00pm a-team meeting
23:45 - 04:00am sea-watch…

And so on! Quite busy, as you can see. In my “free time” I’ve also been working on the ship’s video edit suite editing 2 video projects. Tomorrow I’m going out with a group of people for ten days to work with a local church.

Here are two photos of me taken in Japan, where we’ve been for the past month:

Greetings, Gentle reader, and welcome to the latest episode of brummie@sea.

Before we get much further, here is a photo of yours truly:

We’re now actually in Kanazawa, which is further north.

I’ve been quite busy this port, as the second waterman has been on a team staying and working off the ship for the whole port. I was also learning a lot about the audio-visual stuff on board the ship, how to use Final Cut Pro, sound balancing, and so on. Fun stuff. We had some of the people from our company’s technical/production side out for a week or so, and doing some training for us.

Since then I’ve been working on the ship’s edit suite making a couple of video projects (a Taiwan report video, and a video about the work the ship did in Philippines to show in Korea).. Final Cut Pro is very very nice software.

Especially once you get rid of the silly one button mac mouse, and put a proper 2 button+scrollwheel on the beast.

I’ve also been working quite a lot on just refilling up the ship with water. We had to pretty much replace all our water with Japanese water, due to strange regulations here, and that was all a bit complex.

I stayed up quite late one night running around the ship with the I.T. guys, when they re-built the network system, rebooting and reconnecting the DHCP client sessions on every computer… We now have internet web access on every ship-computer (not personal laptops). That is really cool.

I am probably going to be changing jobs fairly soon, I don’t know where yet. Possibly into I.T and Videographer, or something like that. Maybe working with the Audio-Visual team running the sound and stuff programmes on board. I’ve been working as a waterman for almost a year now. On Doulos that’s a long time. I just looked in our logbook the other day, which I started us keeping. The first entries are from August last year. Amazing.

I applied for the job of Technical Administrator. It would be quite interesting, and a big challenge too. A more technical ship work, and I could learn a lot of administration skills that would be useful in whatever job I end up doing in the future.

Doing all the video and all that these last two weeks, and hanging around with the IT guys a bit, I know that that is where I enjoy working most. I love doing video editing, and IT configuring and installing and all that work is so much more satisfying than water stuff. I miss programming a lot.

I miss linux, actually. Now THAT’s a geeky comment.

But whatever job I end up doing here, it’ll be useful, and also a good change. I’m really tired of the waterman’s job. It’s a great job, you can learn sooo much. And it’s very interesting, very much responsibility, very much independence. More independence than any other job on the ship, probably. Still. It’s time for a change. I’m tired of the midnight phone calls, of thinking about the ship’s water and list and draft 24/7. Of being “on call” whenever I’m on the ship. Of working alone, truely alone. Even working with the other waterman, I still miss being part of a team. I don’t much enjoy being a leader. I prefer to be a team player. Able to relax with others who know as much or more than I do, and able to pass the ball around, rather than just holding it myself, or watch my partner/assistant run with it the whole time.

This has been a fun week… most of it. Exciting, and all, anyway. We had a damage control drill, in which the fire attack team had a chance to play with our big emergency submersible pump (big blue thing, about the size of a child and the weight of a man) which had to be carried down to the engine room, and dropped into a tank of water, and then they had the fun of emptying a few tons out of the porthole, and then the rest we transferred into another tank. Great fun for them, very good that they finally get a chance to work with that pump (it’s a monster!). And the tanks, of course, mean work for the watermen! :-)

We had two tanks which were on schedule for being worked in (we emptied out one of them a month or so ago, and had deck teams in there scraping off the old dead cement, and we last week got the new cement on all the walls.

So we had to open up this empty tank again, and open up the other tank, and get everything ready for that. This meant the usual sitting for a few hours in a bilge/tanktop covered in slime and grease and oil with various sizes of wrenches/spanners getting the manhole open.. This one also created a few more problems though, as some of the nuts were really old and totally seized up.

I had to find out how to get them off. I tried everything I knew how to do (various lubricants, hammers, spanners with extensions, and so on). My next and final option was to grind the thing off. As this is in a bilge, with oil and all about, it’s quite dangerous to do grinding, as you have sparks all over the place. So you need “Hot Work permits” which are paperwork to make sure you follow all safety procedures, have another guy on firewatch while you work, have fire extinguishers ready, etc… The chief mate suggested I try using just a oil burner/torch and heating up the nut around the edges, to try and expand it and so free it up. This would also require Hot Work permits, but would be safer, and also a lot easier, if it worked.

As I was getting ready for this (with the deadline being the drill the day after), the chief engineer suggested just using a “Nut splitter”, a really cool tool I’d never seen before. Basically it’s a chisel with a threaded end, a bolt on the end, and a case to drive it through the nut, as you tighten the bolt. Very cool indeed. So I found this device, and amazingly, it worked! Very nice indeed. I was chatting with the Engine Foreman afterwards, and he suggested a few other ideas involving chisels (and hitting the bolt in the right places to expand the right parts). So I have lots of new stuff learned. Cool. I’ll put it all in the “Waterman’s Bible.”