Dark Thoughts

Well, I find myself back in China again, only 3 weeks after being wed to my wonderful wife.

The wedding was an amazing day of being pampered, and in beautiful surroundings with beautiful people. It went way too fast of course, but the next week of relaxing at the Burswood and down south at a nice little secluded hideaway were magical. We only had a couple of weeks though, and then I was straight back into the thick of things at work. On a horror 24 hour red-eye from Perth to Baotao, in Inner Mongolia, before 5 hours for an overnighter in Linhe, and another 3 hours out to site.

Site is pretty much everything I had expected. Nothing works, getting anything done is a chore (heck, one of my work colleages has been waiting for 8 weeks to get a light bulb changed). I've had a light bulb explode on me, caught a hungry little mouse in my room, and had more shouting matches with unco-operative contractors in the last week than I've had in my life previously.

Every single little thing needs to be endlessly debated and disagreed with, even if it has previously been agreed to. Instructions are issued, agreed to, only to be ignored or completely disregarded. I can understand why this place was doing my fellow workers' heads in. Everything here is about saving 10c right now, even if it's going to cost you thousands in a week to fix the stuff up caused by the 10c saving. Oh, and add to that, the fact that no-one can every be wrong, and it's a recipe for hair tearing.

Not that it's all bad. The labourer's are fantastic. Smart and hard working, even if they have to pay for every shower that they have, and get 75c per day for food. It's the management that's the real problem. Management positions are seen as positions of status where people don't do any work, and just boss other's around. Never mind supporting the bloke's on the coal face, they are seen as a lower class of citizen who should be working as the manager's slaves.

There is a complete disregard for safety, or for anything really that has any real use, or any common sense. There's no problem spending a few hundred bucks on a slap up meal to welcome guests, but be blowed if they'll spend a couple of bucks to supply them with clean drinking water, or a clean room.

Blah, enough fire breathing from me today. I've got to go and fight a contractor for the next few hours to get a valve put in, that they agreed to put in, so that we wouldn't have to shut down the entire plant every time one of their cheap ass flow controllers break down (which seems to be about every 2 weeks). Why they don't get something decent that will last the job rather than the flimsy, leaky pieces of cheap shit that have the lowest price tag on is beyond me.

Ciao for now.