Meanwhile, back in Sydney...
The morning after the weekend before, I went back to work, but not before returning to the infamous Kings Cross backpackers' car market to pick up Tara the Tarago and get her a safety certificate (a pre-requisite of selling a vehicle in New South Wales). However my garage of choice (the nearest one) was too busy, and there was no parking nearby, so I had to book her in for the next morning. Grrr.
So the next morning I drop Tara off successfully, but have to go back at lunch time to collect her. It's a good job Arup are relatively understanding, as over Monday and Tuesday I wasn't really around in the office at very regular times! Finally on Tuesday lunch time I get a chance to do the paperwork to allow Tara to actually enter the market, as it were, and I even get talking to a potential buyer! That is, until I discover that he's looking for something for himself, his wife, and their two kids. With Tara having only two seats, this was unfortunately a non-starter. Back to work I went, hoping for calls from more buyers...
While i'm on the subject of work (which has become my main focus now that Hannah has flown on to India) I have found my first few weeks in Arup's Sydney office a little frustrating, to say the least. I have joined a very large project team (our project is the expansion of Brisbane Airport's domestic terminal) and unwittingly joined just two weeks before a big deadline (issue of scheme design). So I have slightly had to jump in at the deep end, which is fine, except that with the exception of a few people, it's been hard to really engage in what the heck is going on, what the project is all about, and what i'm supposed to be doing. To be honest I expected this would be the case for the first few days - engineers are often rubbish communicators - but I didn't expect this would still be the case, left almost twiddling my thumbs sometimes, two weeks later.
My frustration culminated with me writing a shitty email to the project manager (the same guy who had recruited me) explaining that I couldn't understand why they had taken me on, at considerable expense (they are paying my normal salary, and accommodation, and a daily allowance on top of that), if they weren't giving me sufficient work (or sufficiently challenging work). Punching below my weight was the phrase I used to sum it up. To my surprise this went down unexpectedly well, and over lunch with the boss on Monday I managed to extract promises that I would take on a more challenging role, looking at the interfaces between the various packages of work (i.e. the fuzzy ill-defined bits where construction projects can go wrong) and also helping to transfer responsibility for some work from Sydney to Brisbane (must be something to do with the weather up in sub-tropical BrisVegas).
So in my third week working here, things did start to improve, but by the end of Friday I was twiddling my thumbs again. This is not the best sensation given that I have come here to work, not fart around. Next week should be better, as there's some big meetings with the senior architects and the client, including a trip up to BrisVegas on Friday. But we'll see... safe to say, my working here has not yet been the making of my career... perhaps only staying three months, not six, would be enough.
Back to the car market this morning (Saturday), where worryingly there were yet more cars and vans than there had been on my previous visits. More worryingly, Tara would not start - a flat battery being the cause. Thankfully a fellow Tarago driver showed me where to find the battery (behind the driver's seat, under the bed, confusingly) and leant me his battery charger. Then he showed me why the battery was going flat - unbeknownst to us, there is a little button on the steering column above the ignition switch, which you have to press in order to turn the key right around to 'lock'. This was something we hadn't been doing, and so had unwittingly been leaving the electrics on the whole time! The fellow Tarago driver was then lucky enough to sell his van, and was kind enough not only to buy a crate of beer for all the other sellers (something of a ritual apparently), but also let me keep the battery charger. Not bad for the first hour.
The rest of the day was slower, and I managed to talk to a grand total of two potential buyers. Crap, this is going to take longer than I thought - there just weren't enough buyers coming to market. Some people had no interest at all, so at least I was winning in those stakes. Unfortunately it seems to be just the wrong time of year - many european backpackers are now returning home, as the weather overnight gets chillier, making it a bit uncomfortable to be sleeping in a van. It's lovely up north though, so my hope is that I will sell to a naive backpacker, straight off the plane to Sydney, who realises it's now colder than expected, and wants to high-tail it to Queensland (i.e. where Tara is registered). Maybe one will turn up tomorrow.
So i'm writing this blog now to kill an hour while I wait for a haircut at the "chop shop" on Victoria St - quite near the car market. Hannah went there a couple of weeks ago and they did a decent job of her fringe, so here's hoping for the best. I haven't had my hair cut since I had it shaved to a Grade 3 all over two days before we left the UK, and I pass pretty well for Shaggy out of Scooby Doo right now, in my faded backpacker threads. Once i've sold Tara, I will treat myself to some new jeans and trainers!
Robin
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