I'm just travellin' travellin' travellin'....

I was in Kempas, Negeri Sembilan and Tanah Merah, Malacca for the whole of last week, came back on Friday, went to Seri Intan, Perak on Sunday and just came back today. I'm certainly getting around in my new job... and haven't even spent more than 2 days in my office in Damansara. I haven't done any of the real fun stuff like scaring the orangutans and checking out marine reefs, and that probably won't happen for a while coz' right now we busy conducting the internal audits for our estates to make sure they are ready for the *real* audit which will be conducted by SIRIM in order to certify our estates' sustainability. And the real audits are starting in June, so we're rushing to finish meeting up with all the estates to make sure they comply. Right now, most of them are lacking in a number of areas, and those poor fellas have a lot of work to do to make sure they comply before SIRIM gets to them. And if they don't get the certification, heads will roll. Apparently some top shot in the company decided he wants all Sime Darby estates to be fully certified by 2010, just so we can be the *first* in the Malaysia to be fully certified in sustainability. Ah yes, to satiate a big shot's ego, the small fries need to work their butts off.

Not to say that I'm not enjoying my work. I certainly find it a lot more interesting than my old job... and I actually understand everything that goes on, which wasn't really the case in Accenture when people started talking technobabble and I'd be like "Huh?". The stuff I learned in uni is quite useful now... and I can point out stuff that doesn't look right at the estates and palm oil mills when we're doing the site visit. Like there was a chemical lab at one mill where the lab guy was walking around wearing slippers... and no one else on my team has done lab work except me, and occupational safety is one of the major criteria of our audit, so I pointed out that he should be wearing covered shoes when handling chemicals, in case they spill on his feet. Tsk tsk, don't even know basic lab safety!

Getting to stay near the outdoors is also fun. When in Kempas, I stayed in this fantastic chalet within the estate grounds, and every morning I'd wake to the sound of chirpy birds and the first thing I'd see when I open the door is green trees and a pond. Ok, the pond is pretty mucky, but that's to be expected in this country. The only problem I had there was when I left the night light on outside one night, went out for dinner, and when we came back, the whole front door of my chalet was swarming with flying ants attracted to the night light. I had no choice but to quickly unlock my door and get in as fast as I could without allowing the bugs in... but a few got in anyway, and I spent about half an hour getting all of them back out my room. Note to self: Do not leave night light on outside chalet room when next time.

Of course, I had a lot of fun taking pictures with my new camera... which turns out to be every but as good as I hoped it would be, especially when taking those close-up shots. Only problem is that I only have one lithium battery and buying an extra one is expensive. So when it runs out of juice, I can't take any more pics. Happened on the first day of my Kempas trip, when I saw this lovely orange dragonfly resting on the grass next to a pond. I snuck up to it, put my camera about 2 cm away from the dragonfly, held my breath to make reduce camera shake, pressed the shutter halfway down to focus, and then.... my camera battery died. And as much as I tried to muster one last shot out of it, it wouldn't deliver. All the while the dragonfly was still sitting there calmly... as if it were mocking me. I thought, "I'll get you next time, you little bugger!" Of course, I charged my battery that night, and made sure it was well and fully charged every day after that. And I DID get the little bugger on the second day.

I took my mini tripod with me this time, so there was no camera shake and the pic is fantastic! Though I still had to sneak up to it and sit on the grass next to the pond to get this pic. My feet were probably 5cm away from the edge of the pond, and I'm sure if someone mean came along and nudged me, I would've fallen in. Fortunately no one was dumb enough to try that, or else they would not be alive today.

Some other fantastic macro shots:

This little bug seems to be hanging on for dear life!

This flower in only about 1cm in size. Whoa.

A close-up of a canna. Major colour overdose!

A very pretty and rather sedated butterfly, which didn't budge even though my camera was 1cm away from it.

Probably the most perfect hibiscus I've ever seen. Looks almost perfectly symmetrical, in full bloom and no sign of withering. I took this at one of the estate manager's house (which btw, is super nice!).

Ok, a not-so-amazing shot of an ice cube... but it's interesting coz' it's from my cup of teh ais which I ordered while at a mamak, and I noticed some swirls of teh ais somehow got trapped within the ice cube. Looked quite fascinating, so I took a pic before it melted into a little pool of teh ais and water.

Of course, while I do enjoy the job and being outdoors, I am starting to see some problems with working here too... or it could be just the managers I've been going to audit the estates with. I've been travelling with two of the managers, one who just used to be from the PR unit and somehow or another ended up in our unit, so he's still learning the ropes, while the other is an ex-estate manager who is supposedly more experienced and is the leader of our team. I'm fine working with the first guy... it's the latter who drives me a bit insane. He's a nice guy...BUT he is SO slow in doing stuff. He's extremely slow at typing, so he asks me to do type. When we have to do the summary of the audits and I have finished compiling all the non-compliant issues, all he needs to do look through it and make corrections (even that is so difficult for him to type), and he takes forever to decide what changes to make. And sometimes he changes the wording to something that means exactly the same thing. For example, a sentence like "To develop a mechanism to monitor the blablabla...". He said he wants to change it "To develop a method to record the blablabla...". I told him it the first sentence means exactly the same thing as the second. He looked at me funny. This was when it was almost midnight and I was down with a cold and all I wanted to do was finish the thing off quick and get to bed, so I didn't argue too much and just changed the sentence. And if that's not annoying enough, he's such a hardcore smoker that every 15 minutes, he has to take a smoking break... which sometimes leaves me in the lurch waiting for him to get done with it quick to finish looking through my summary. And I'm not a big fan of stinky cigarette smoke breath too. And sometimes, during the meetings with the estate staff, they can waste a lot of time talking nonsense and having tea breaks when they should be working. So when the managers I'm with complain that they have so much work to do and not enough time, I just roll my eyes and try my best to refrain from pointing out why they don't have enough time.

At least since I understand my work, all I need to do is gain a bit more experience before I can start doing audits on my own... or at least without THIS manager... so I can finish my work faster. This weekend I have to go to Sabah... not for another internal audit, but to observe the SIRIM as they conduct their audit in one of the estates. I don't like having a weekend taken up, but I do like being able to see these guys and ask them first-hand all the nagging questions I have for them about what they are looking for. My goal right now is to learn as much as I can as soon as possible so I can work independantly and not have to put up with other people's bad time management.

My other goal is also to get through all my backlogged emails, coz' now I have more than 50 unread messages in the inbox. Ack!