Unexpectedly confined

[]

Busy, busy, busy. That’s the reply you’re gonna get if you asked me to sum up the week in 3 words. With preparations for Australia next month going into full swing, every piece of equipment that we ship over has got to be speck-free. Ok, we don’t know how strict the Australian Quarantine & Inspection Service (AQIS) is going to be, but they’ve definitely got to demand some standards. So, it has been a week of hard scrubbing and cleaning.

With some luck and trial-and-errors, after dabbling with kerosene, thinner, alcohol, and whatnots, we finally just settled on water and magic sponges. Yes, you read that right. They’re really called Magic Sponge which we bought from Japan Home at $1.90 each. What a ripoff! That was our thoughts initially. However, after several failed attempts (and damaging a few sponges in the process), we started to see its effect. It simply only required sponging the surface with water and a couple of hard wipes with a dry cloth and viola! Don’t squeeze it though.

Unfortunately, at the rate we were going then, we had to work our asses off the last day as the deadline loomed and in the process, we also used and wasted more sponges than any other platoons. But those were not the only things that we had to clean. We still had TES equipment to clean as well as to load them back into the containers. Not an easy task considering that you had to work your fingers into tiny crevices to scrap off the mud stains left on the surface from god-knows-when and the manpower we had available.

Oh, the weather wasn’t working in our favour too. It has been raining very often for the past 2 weeks if you had noticed. And that certainly slowed things down for us. Ok, maybe that was an excuse! :X But to make matters worse, we had to do preparations for next week’s evaluation concurrently which just served to increase our excessively outrageous workload. And as if we were not already laden with enough work, someone had to call for IPPT training (supposed to be a test at first) on Friday, completely oblivious to the fact that many of us were trying rushing to meet the deadline. Fortunately, you can’t have your cake and eat it every time. Lady Luck shone and bestowed rain that morning.

But the bomb was dropped just before dinner that day. As much as we had wanted to book out, it was not meant to be because the inspection date has been pushed forward to the coming Friday, right after our evaluation, which spells a certain doom. And so as to make sure everything goes according to plan and that we don’t get overloaded with work next week, we eventually came to a unanimous decision that some of us would stay over till Saturday to get the work done.

Hence, we worked for 7+ hours straight, from 1930 to 0300, with the exceptions of short breaks, to complete the daunting tasks of cleaning up the signal sets. Though physically taxing, that was probably the most fruitful and enjoyable hours I spent in camp for the week. Besides, we were getting a day off for this so that just makes it all the more worthwhile. We left camp at around 0845 for breakfast together at Ya Kun before retiring home. So, up to this point, I’ve been running on 3 hours of sleep for the past 48 hours which is really taking a toll on me now. More days like this next week? Damn.