At least I think it's still day... hard to keep track at the moment, lack of sleep does that to you.
I think I shall start the recount of events around the time we decided to try out a new fish and chip shop which we discovered not far from our house last night. It looks tidy and we figured it would be worth a shot. So, we pop round there and order 2 fish (battered red emperor), 2 hot dogs (Pluto pups over here), and $4 worth of chips which apparently is a suitable amount for two persons.
There was a good looking young sheila serving us, and I fully blame her for distracting us enough to not check our meal before we got home and attempted to consume it. I say attempted, because what we ended up with and what we ordered appeared to be two completely different things. Unless of course "battered fish" actually means "crumbed fish" and "2 x Pluto pups" actually means "6 chicken nuggets, 6 squid rings, 6 dim sims, and a deep fried sausage".
Because that is precisely what we had.
The funny thing is, we were the only customers in the shop, so unless they had a telephone order I believe it unlikely they could have mixed up orders... although it certainly appeared that way.
I just feel sorry for the other poor galah who expects to find his dim sims and squid rings and ends up with 2 battered fish and a couple of hotdogs.
Anyhow, that slight hiccup aside, we then decided to watch James Bond on television, as they are playing every Bond from start to finish, one a week, on a Saturday evening. It ran fairly late as it did not start until about 20:30, and then by the time it finished it was nearing one in the morning. I was fairly tired by then and falling asleep in my armchair (it must run in the family), so I was glad to get to bed.
I glanced across at the callout phone just as I was about to turn out the light, and thought to myself "that's good, so far this week we haven't had any callouts!" Famous last words, and I may have jinxed us, as not one minute later just as I turned off the light, the phone went off. "Urgent link fault, multiple sites off air, get it sorted ASAP".
Brilliant.
So, back out of bed, go and get Ryan out of bed as he happened to be the 2nd on call, and off to work to pick up the spare parts. Except neither of us have keys, and the supervisor wasn't answering his telephone...
So, after tossing a few ideas around, we decided to go and wake the supervisor up by knocking on his door. After calming his dog down and explaining the situation to him, he came down to work and let us in to get the parts we required for this job. The particular sites involved neither Ryan or I had been to, so we got the book which supposedly has all the site location instructions in it. Well, it might, but two things it didn't have was the instructions on how to get to either of the two sites we needed to go to. So, boot up the computers, get the info, print it out... etc etc.
After nearly setting the truck on fire with some dodgy wiring, we finally got on the road and on the way to the first site. Surprisingly, we managed to locate it without too much difficulty, other than a couple of stupidly designed gates. After encountering a good sized spider on our windscreen, we finally decided that the fault wasn't at this site and must be at the other end. So, back in the truck, and drove to the other site. Well... at least we would have had we known where it was.
We got close by, as we knew the general idea, but as it was still dark we could not see the tower. Luckily we had a GPS coordinate for it so I entered it into my "can do everything" phone and used the GPS to guide us to the site. We finally found the track leading up to the site and drove up it.
After logging in with the three different companies which we have to ring before going on site, we managed to get to the hut and start trying to work out what was wrong.
As I had never dealt with the equipment on this particular site, I was at the mercy of the Brisbane techs on the other end of the phone, and most of them were not much help. After a few hours of fruitless tests, and a few parts swapped out, we decided it must be another special part which we didn't have with us. By this time it was about 9:00 and we were well sick of the sight of this site, and ended up telling the supervisor we were calling it a day and going back to bed, as by then we had both been up for over 24 hours straight. He understood and tried to get another team together to replace us, but typical Australians, no one wanted to help. So the poor supervisor ended up going and doing it himself, usually I would have just carried on but I was missing obvious signs of faults and my capacity for logical thought patterns was rapidly diminishing.
So, as of now I have no idea what the status of that site is, for all I know he is still up there battling it. I let Ryan drive back to work, and I must have fallen asleep in the passenger seat of the Ute as somehow he managed to get some photographic evidence. He probably used a camera.
So by the time we got home and crashed for a few hours, that's pretty much the day written off. Spent the rest of the day getting the gear together for the trip to Injune tomorrow, as that's another early start.
Oh yes... I can't recall if I mentioned this previously but a while back our other Kiwi mate went back to NZ for the weekend, and when he got back he found a skeleton of a huntsman hanging from the roof of his car. Never found the spider but.
So, we have been driving this car around a couple of times since then, no sign, so we figured he must have run away. Well, when I got home today, I hopped out of the car, looked up, and... there was no doubt in my mind as to where that huntsman had got to. He was sitting on the roof right above my head. So, I strategically manoeuvred out of the way so that he wouldn't jump on my head as they tend to do, and attacked him with some fly spray, which I can quite confidently report he did not like. As Jonesy would say, "they don't like it up 'em!"
Flyspray 1, spider nill.
Right, I better go and do nothing for a while, then go back to bed.
TTFN!
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