Tales of my life: Tauranga

So I’m now in Tauranga. Tauranga is a really nice place. Weather is awesome most of the time and loving the pace the city live by. Guess I’m really not a big city kinda person.

First day blunders
Work started yesterday. The Tauranga office is really relaxed. I started on Friday (yeah, weird day to start work) and it so happens to be “dress down day”. I put on a polo shirt and jeans as I don’t wanna dress too low on my first day. Some ppl even came to work in t-shirt, shorts and slippers. Thought that was pretty cool. Oh, and you also take your own break and lunch time. Being new I don’t know when is the best time to take a break so I end up not using my two 10 minute breaks. All you need to do is just fill up your time sheet against what project you are working on and the client would be billed accordingly. Kinda funny thinking the client gets billed $30-$40 for an hour of my time. Worth it you think? I certainly don’t think so! Haha..

I’m assigned under the heavy industry team. The first half of the day was pretty boring. Had to read some Work Instruction/Health and Safety thingy and fill up a quiz after that. Did two sets; safety in office and working with hazardous material. Really didn’t want to fail it so I took quite a long time answering the questions. Guess what, I got half of it wrong for the hazardous material one. Haha, but I pass anyways. Guess they pass everyone just as long as you read it up and fill in the quiz. The latter half of the day I was scanning ancient 200 pages worth of engineering drawings. Darn that was boring and frustrating since the big machine was not really in the mood to cooperate. Then I had to scan a project file. Didn’t realize some of the pages were stapled together. Guess it was getting late and I was already really tired. I lined the whole stack of document nicely on the scanner and pressed start. It end up ripping the first few pages apart. Haha… Oh well, it’ll surely get better. Apparently on Monday I’m gonna do some calculation on pipe stresses, some mixing plant project in Auckland. Got no idea how to do it, but it’ll be good. ;)

My first South African Brai
Last night I was invited by Katherine for dinner. Kat’s house is very impressive. Its located on a hill with lots of avocado trees and heaps of farm animals. Felt like I was back at my village, only that it’s way cleaner and tidier here. Those were the days, waking up in the morning and collecting chicken and duck eggs. Anyways, the main event of the night was the Brai. A brai is what South Africans call a barbecue. I just love barbecues. Think I had at least 4 in the last 2 weeks. There was this guy last night, he is just hilarious. He just reminds me how unique kiwi sense of humour is. Just can’t help bursting into laughters everytime he speaks. What a joker!