The Thoughts of Bonny Scotland

I awoke this morning early and felt distinctly cold, almost a shiver as I got out of bed to shower, I showered quickly and had to dry off inside the cubicle as it was so goddam cold in there, I rushed to get dressed and put on my normal attire a long sleeved shirt which is mandatory and a pair of long pants. I went out of the accommodation to the office to be greeted with what I can only describe as a Scottish type environment, it was dull and grey and heavily overcast, there was mist rolling about the small hills that surround the site it was almost foggy, this is real mist and we are only at 300 meters altitude. I was cold and the office was cold and as I did my mail and went to breakfast I was getting colder. I just couldn’t stop thinking about all the holidays I have had on the west coast of Scotland watching the mist rolling up and down the hills and dressed for winter in mid summer, woolly pully and jacket and vests and long socks and usually a hood to protect against the wind. That is how I was feeling, distinctly not like I was in the tropics. I know this is effectively the winter here but I am within the tropic of Capricorn and I should be basking in glorious sunshine and feeling the heat. I had breakfast feeling very chilly and the yoghurt and cold serial wasn’t very good making me even colder, I left and went straight back to my room to put on a t-shirt and an over shirt as I don’t really have a warm jacket as I wasn’t expecting these sort of temperatures and I finally started to feel warm, I did my usual routine of checking the units and lifted a few moths of fthe screens but there was only two butterflies, most had the sense to stay in bed this morning until the sun shines if it does at all today, yesterdays flights in and out were cancelled as the cloud base was too low for safe landing so they had hoped to get all the guys in and out today but once again it may be too foggy and misty for safe landing, but I don’t care I don’t travel for another 2 weeks and that is if my back to back returns unscathed from his trip back home to Mexico. This job has changed direction for me, I am basically a contractual services manager and I am more of an administrator rather than a working engineer. I do have the responsibility of the Gas turbines and Compressors and I have to manage them but I have all the managerial paperwork to complete and be the gopher for the office in Florence, requesting solutions to problems and trying to sort out logistical problems for the purchase of items that take 16 weeks to get to a normal site not a remote location where heavy objects have to be brought in by boat up the Amazon river and have to arrive during the rainy season as the river runs to a low trickle during the dry season. Other items can be flown in but this has to be coordinated with Peruvian customs and being a creator of the ugliest customs regulations you cannot even get an express mail letter here without it going through customs and if the paperwork is wrong for it then it just sits there until somebody either gets the paperwork correct or forgets about it, nothing is easy to get here and this nightmare has now become my little corner, trying to identify where something is in the chain, either in transit or customs or lost or even stolen, this could be a great job if it were somewhere like the USA but here I could be swamped with the never ending paper chase.