Do her wrong

Glub Glarhgla.

That's "G'Day" in underwater speak for the uneducated.

One is getting good at speaking that, just at the moment, as it has been raining for over a week now. We had a brief respite yesterday, enough to spend the day stuck on a roof with a South African tied to a bucket truck anyhow. It was an interesting day, shall we say. I would love to have video cameras for eyes, as there are certainly some entertaining aspects of this job which are just too priceless to even attempt to put into words. I shan't even attempt it as I know I would never be able to give them suitable justice.

Work has picked up a lot this week. We are stretched to find the man power within the company to get all the work completed, so things are fairly flat out. I have two weeks at the mine coming up for the next fortnight, so that should be an interesting couple of weeks too. The plan is two of us are going out to check the GPS on all the lighting plants. Problem being, the GPS is currently not working, so we have no idea where the ruddy things are. The mine lease is a lot of land, so I suspect that a giant game of hide and seek is about to unfold. On the bright side, having someone else to drive will be advantageous as it should allow me to get some good video footage.

I've been on call the week, usually the only callouts (if any) are to vodafone cell sites. Not so this week, a couple of direct customer callouts. Of course the first thing they ask is "how much is it gunna cost me?" Which of course I had no idea, I don't do the billing. So I tell them that it's minimum charge of 4 hours at overtime rates, and apart from that I can't be much more help.
First callout was a good one, to a pub, and given the friendliness of the stunning waitress that I was dealing with, I was quite happy to get out of bed for her. (I would have been even more happy to get IN to bed for her now I think about it)...
And the second callout was to a boat to fix up a satellite phone, so that wasn't quite as interesting.

I had an interesting job up at a cell tower about 2 hours drive away, it's up a 8 KM 4WD track, which was good fun after the week of rain. There were some serious ruts on a steep bit near the top, but low 1st and a strategic approach angle allowed me to traverse them without too much hassle. The ruts were about 1 foot across and easily 2 feet deep. Just goes to show how a little bit of previous experience can be handy, if I had tried to drive straight over I would have been instantly struck, likewise if I had tried to drive down the rut sideways I would have just slid into it. The poor old apprentice sitting next to me didn't have much faith that we would make it up there though. The last bit was seriously overgrown, with grass taller than the truck. Couldn't see a helluva lot, but given the "beware of snakes" sign, I was buggered if I was going to get out and walk it first.

I also had an interesting job down at a place called Agnes Waters, we had to go and perform a routine check on a country radio station transmitter. The trip down was different, as I was going with an old guy from work who drives the only remaining range rover in the fleet, so it was good getting to ride down in a real vehicle.
Well, when we got on site, we discovered that the power supply for the transmitter had carked it and of course this meant that the station was off air. Just goes to show how many people in Agnes actually listen to country radio, then. Usually when a radio station goes off air it's a major panic to fix it, these guys didn't even know it was down. After a bit of bodging repair work we managed to get it on air, but not before we managed to blow the protection fuse. Which of course we didn't have a spare for. So I ended up soldering a single strand of power cable across the blown glass fuse and deciding that it looked pretty close to a 1 amp fuse. Worked OK however, so eventually I'll get around to replacing it with the genuine article.

Apart from that, I can't think of any one major event worth writing down... the week has been that busy I can't even remember what else I got up to. I remember something about trying to use a power cable to pull another cable up a wall, and getting them both stuck half way so I couldn't go up or down. That wasn't much fun. Typical short cut really, ended up adding 1/2 hour on the job where as it was supposed to save about that time.

I really ought to write all of this at once instead of ducking away to do other things in the middle, I imagine the whole thing would have much better continuity if I remembered what I had just written. Never mind, we get there in the end.

I've been too busy to take any interesting photos this week, shock horror. I'll try and make up for it next week.

TTFN