How depressing!

So I got back to work yesterday morning. Boo! Holidays are over!

First up, I get the pagi-pagi (VERY early morning) flight from Medan at 6:20am, which involves waking up at 5. Blah. And when I rock up to work, our premises manager very calmly tells me that a couple of days ago, someone broke into my office and stole my laptop. Great!

So I’ve lost all my recent photos, all my (very-slooooowly-downloaded) music, and some important work files (yes, IT heads, I did back-up my files about a week prior, but I ran out of time to back up the most important items I was working on right up to the night before I left…). Let’s just say I was much more distressed at the loss of personal files than work ones.

Then the fun begins. I’d forgotten how much I love Simeulue. Power going off all the time. Internet really slow and/or not working. I had to set up everything on my replacement laptop again – including my email. So what does Outlook do? It proceeds to download EVERY SINGLE EMAIL I’ve received to this account. All 2700 of them. Since August 2007. From oldest to newest. At an excruciatingly slow pace.

By lunchtime, I’d downloaded about 250 of them. Not bad, around 10 percent. And then, it started downloading duplicate copies of them. So I still haven’t caught up on what the hell’s been happening for the last month.

And the final blow is, that, for the last month, NOTHING has been happening. All the things that I organised to be progressed and/or completed basically didn’t happen. Everything is STILL on hold. The material order I checked and cross-checked and finalised in the weeks before I left was never actually done because my boss decided the numbers had to be EXACTLY right before placing them, and Logistics didn’t know what some of the items or their specs were – and didn’t work with WatSan to get this sorted. So, my boss also asked my team to count, dunny by dunny (rather than village by village as I’d done), the exact numbers of items required.

He’s totally paranoid about people taking us for a ride, again. Fair enough. But time is marching on, seemingly at an increasing pace, and we just needed to get SOMETHING ordered so my team can actually continue building. So what if it was out by a little bit. We can add that to the next big order. I know it’s not the best way to do things – it’s always good to get numbers sorted – but my team have been waiting for materials to be ordered for over 3 months. Now we’ve lost another month.

And I still can’t find a copy of the calculations I used to make the material order, the most important document I need to avoid reinventing the wheel. That got lost with my laptop, and all the people I gave a copy to don’t have one any more, for some reason. Fuckers.

I really felt like crying yesterday. And punching my boss. And logistics.

Oh yeah, and it’s Ramadhan. So everyone’s fasting, no-one’s working (and thus my project is going even more slowly), and the call to prayer goes on loudly all through the day and into the night, every night. It's like the mosques are competing with each other. People play soccer and set off firecrackers at random times of the early morning. I am definitely using my ear plugs!

At least I had a great dinner last night with the Simeulue crew – freshly caught fish and wine and G&Ts. And we set off a BIG firecracker of our own in retaliation, and almost blew up the house. Gold! It actually created quite a stir in our neighbourhood, my neighbours weren't very happy with us... but hey, fair's fair! If they can light fireworks, why can't we?

And at least I had a trip to the field to look forward to today. Although I must say, after the six earth tremors between 7am (that beats my alarm clock any day – I haven’t sprung out of bed that fast EVER!) and 10:30am, I was feeling kinda shaky and not really feeling like going anywhere. Still, the Simeulue Earth Movement Show finished on the sixth tremor and (touch wood) since then hasn’t bothered us. However, we are all waiting for another Big One. Maybe I’ll get another wake up call tomorrow morning?

Did I mention how much I’m loving being back at work? Only 5 months to go… and I’m betting that my project won’t be finished then. Yeah, in a negative frame of mind at the moment.