Let me just make sure that every one remembers why I am here.
Even though it looks like my days are spend training for competitions, competing and travelling around the world, I do occasionally find the time to work also.
And work can be rather intense at times, even though, fortunately, it remains a lot of fun.
Here is one ‘typical’ day for me …
My alarm clock wakes me up at 5:55 AM, just in time for the 6:00 AM news on BBC World Service.
After the news, I get out of bed and get ready and I normally leave the house at about 6:20 AM. I have to arrive at the Jurong Island Check point before 7:00 as the queus become much longer after than. I need to scan my badge to prove that I have a right to enter, than an armed security guard inspects my car, including the boot (or trunk depending on where you learned your English). At this time of day it takes less than 5 minutes to go through, but at 7:30 or later, it may take as much as 20-30 minutes.
I still have a 10 km drive on Jurong Island to get to Area 17 – I am not sure where the ‘code names’ came from – where I need to park my car, scan another badge that gives me access to the plant and take a bus to go to my office. There are regular shuttle buses, so the wait is not long. After about 3 km and a stop at the PDO-X, I get to Area 18, where my office is, at about 7:30. All these “Areas” (there is an area 16, and 24, but so far I have not found Area 51) are temporary facilities for the SPT Project (Singapore Parallel Train – the MEGA-Project I am working on). Just to give you an idea of the size of this project:
- We recently celebrated 5 million manhours without a loss time injury – and we are not even measuring construction progress as we are still in site preparation
- We expect 14000-15000 workers at the peak of construction
- We have at least 12 major contracts with engineering and construction companies around the world
- Currently we have people in Houston, Yokohama, Tokyo, Reading and Singapore working on this project.
So, as you can see, there are reasons to be busy.
During a typical day, I will take my bicylce to go into the plant and see how construction is progressing, or look at equipment that has been recently installed, or just to do a safety audit and insure that all is being done with Safety as the first priority. All of us are asked to do at least one safety audit every week.
I will also take a shuttle bus 2-3 times to go to other offices around the plant for meetings or discussions. There is also lunch, which until recently was only available at the main plant cafeteria – therefore a shuttle bus ride required for that too. The cafeteria at Area 18 is now open, so we can avoid that extra ride.
Because of the number of people scattered around the world, a lot of things happen with e-mail. I typically have 50-80 unread e-mails when I come into my office. It is very easy to get into an ‘infinite loop’ with e-mails and I have decided that if I cannot resolve an issue after 2-3 e-mails back and forth, it is time to talk, even if this requires an early morning or late night call to find the right people. I think this has helped me getting things done quicker in general.
Part of my responsibility is the SPA-X Project. It is a very significant expansion of the SPA Plant, which I helped to design and build between 1996 and 2001, the reason for my stay in Singapore. For this we are working with FWP and MCD, two very large contractors. We only have a small crew and therefore we are heavily dependent on them to manage the work. A lot of time each day is spent to make sure that they can do that efficiently by removing “barriers” that always seem to come up. A recent example had to do with temporary offices – the base plant requires a permit which needs many signatures. Each person, before he signs, will usually have some ‘additional’ requests and I had to cut through these to get the permit. Not always fun, but challenging, and requiring to discuss with many different people.
I leave the office around 17:30 to 18:30, depending on what comes up at the end of the day, and retrace my steps of the morning: shuttle bus from Area 18 to Area 17 via PDO-X, get into my car and drive out of Jurong Island – there is no check point to go out so traffic moves well. However, there is always traffic on the AYE and therefore it takes me longer to get hoe, ususally between 1h30 and 2h.
I am not necessarily done with my work day.
Once or twice a week, I have teleconferences in the evening. Because of how disperse the team is, the only time that we can get everybody together is 21:00 Japan, 20:00 Singapore, 14:00 UK and 7:00 Houston time. So I will be on the phone for anywhere from 30 to minutes to 2 hours on many different subjects.
I am certainly not complaining … I just want to make sure that my readers realise that there is another side to my life which, after all, pays for all the fun ans games I normally share on these pages.
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While my son Adam was in Beijing, I asked why he only blogged about going out and partying. He said that writing about studying in your room for most of the day isn’t very interesting. He has a point, there.
Your regular work day takes you to the same place. I have three modes.
(1) When I’m normally working, the commute from my bed to my desk is one metre. This isn’t very conducive to keeping fit, so I envy your blog posts where you get exercise.
(2) When I’m doing client work, I normally pick hotels relatively close to the client. This means that (a) I travel on airplanes quite frequently (but have managed to reduce the Monday morning lineups of late); and (b) when I’m onsite at a client, I don’t have a regular desk. The most infamous location — in the days when the Internet was less prevalent — was in the “machine room”, where the big computers are housed, and the temperature is about 15 degrees Celsius. Nowadays, I work where ever my laptop is.
(3) When I’m doing research work, I tend to be in university settings. When I’m playing the role of faculty, I’m usually offered an office and desk, and (most importantly) an Internet connnection. Many times, though, I play the role of student, and may be found sitting on the floor against the wall, near a power outlet and/or strong Internet signal.
I’ve been visiting in the UK for 2 weeks, and notice that a lot of people here are now getting comfortable with the mobile Internet, and surfing on their phones. I think that I’m pretty much old school in that respect, and need a full keyboard … although I could probably live with a smaller screen.