Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Paris conference booked

I booked my tickets for Paris! Going to be in France from August 30th to September 10th. From beginning to end, the whole trip is almost 2 weeks. I leave HK on a Thursday night and get a day to wander around Paris (maybe with other people who are also going to the conference?). Then I have six straight days of hardcore geotech conference. I think the conference will end at decent times and can go explore Paris again during the evenings. After the conference, I have almost another six days of vacation. I am thinking I want to go to the south of France and just chill in nice seaside towns and beaches. The conference and airfare is pretty much all funded through a combination of HKIE and my company. So it should be good. I should really read my previous posts on Paris to see what I have done before!

It started raining again this week. I guess it's okay since it's not as hot. Sometimes it just pours a lot and people usually try to wait it out, at least during the really hard downpour part. It's kind of dangerous to be working at site during heavy rain anyway. Things get slippery. Today, I got stuck outside after doing a round of inspections. The clouds just came in really fast and I barely had time to make it to an umbrella before it started pouring. There are some really large umbrellas set up to workers around the site (mostly to provide shade). I was wondering when I would get to go back to the site office when the guy driving a dirt truck offered me his umbrella. That was really nice. I got back to the office and returned the umbrella to him as he was leaving the site. I still go pretty wet though but these days I bring another change of clothes with me. It's a really good thing that I bought a pair of water resistant pants at REI in Portland when we did that road trip.

I've been finding site life really boring. Lately, all we have been doing is piling works. There is nothing else going on. I don't have to deal with all the messy stuff anymore so all I'm really responsible for is doing routine inspections and following the site progress. I think that following site progress is really as much work as you want to put into it. You can get down to as detail as what each piling plant is doing at a particular moment or you can not care at all and just enter data as they come in. I kind of feel that knowing everything is extreme but not knowing anything is not really being responsible. I just think that our role as site supervision team is really extraneous to the entire construction process. We're part of the quality control effort but we're really only there so that someone can be held responsible when something goes wrong. Other than feeling extraneous, I also feel that there is really no opportunities working at site. It really doesn't matter how good I am, I would still be doing the same sort of thing over and over again. I've realized that what I really like is to be able to move up in an organization and keep getting more of the spotlight. But as site staff, there is nothing to move up to. I feel like it's becoming a big waste of time. It's not like I can really do other things at site since there is always someone interrupting me. I'm wondering if I can go back to the office early and rotate to the structures team and learn from them for a while. Don't know if this will really work out but the most I would be staying  on site is until the end of this year anyway.

1 comment:

yalu said...

whoa, I guess I never realized your trip was so long! I thought it was 5 days or something.