Being the Court Torturer

Today was one of those days when I was feeling like I was at a loose end with nothing really constructive to do and so I created a task to check some vent settings just to satisfy my curiosity. The frustration that I suffered from it made me think that it wasn’t really worth the effort. I should have gone for a walk down the river or into the jungle, or anything other than try and get some people to use their initiative, that is something I have realised that in poor countries that is the first victim of not wanting to screw something up. They are so worried that if they do something wrong they will get fired so unless you are stood waving your hands giving them detailed instructions about what you want them to do , they will do nothing. So today it took me 45 minutes to get a guy to turn a handle through 90°, the temperature shot up nearly 100°F in the compartement and if I hadn’t bypassed the trip signal, I would have shut down the Gas Turbine. So I had to run back out from the control room to the guy and then tell him to turn it back through 90°, it was a farce of the highest order and since I have been frustrated by the total lack of any imagination here on sight I have given up totally. I am just thinking about my next project and my manager has agreed to let me go , it is just a matter of finding the next reasonable project where I can take the wife and have a normalish life.

I am also suffering what can only be described as a plague of petty thievery. When I leave at night to go to my room someone sneaks into my office and steals my butterflies, this isn’t what you call property theft but it pissed me off enough to want to castrate the culprit and cast him out into Peru lonely and poverty stricken. I know that here poverty is the real deal and that someone losing their job is a bad thing but if I ever find out who it is then I will do something nasty to him, not sure quite what I could do without getting fired myself but I would want revenge. I would make him follow me around the sight bagging up all my butterflies so he can suffer the sweating I do when I am engulfed in the horribly hot air of the cooling fans, he is taking the easy way to collect the butterflies by taking my star specimens. Oh I want to do something really bad to him, has anyone got any suggestions, I could tie him down over an ant hill and the ants here are really nasty, with huge jaws. I could fill his underpants with leeches, oh yes that sounds particularly horrible, I need to know he is suffering. Sorry I am getting my imagination running away with itself. Life is such in another time I could have been the court torturer and been a very happy content man and would have worked quite independently without supervision and on my own initiative. Unlike some I know here.