Welcome to my world, sit back, relax and let me entertain you!

And here I stand, one month since my last post looking back on my Tong Park experience. It has sure been quirt a ride, I’m glad to have finished my job, and looking back it hasn’t been too bad. Well let’s just continue it from where we left off last time!

Not long time since my last post a guy left our small maintenance team; we had some good parties together so it was a little sad that he left. The funny thing was that on his last week he really didn’t give a s***, so he was driving around (well, drifting most of the time) like a maniac, so funny to see. Unfortunately I was working with him on his final 2 days, and it really was a pain in the a** cuz I was the only person working, (he was mainly playing with the pigs ). Well, after he left the maintenance team was in low numbers, and it wasn’t only in the maintenance team where people left! The heat was starting to get intense so that might have caused it; I was certainly starting to struggle more during mid-day, and drinking heaps more than normal (in the end not even a 1.5l bottle of water seemed to be enough). Another thing why all that people might have left was that many guys were talking s*** about Tong Park, so that might as well have started that chain reaction; I mean, we went from about 50 people to around 25, it was mental!

I’d say that I started counting my days that I had done not long after I made my last post, but I have to confess that days started going even slower after that. I had made this countdown manager in Excel, measuring days worked, percentage done, days left and working weeks left; it was so good to come home in the end of a hard/long day and tick one more day in the system and see the days drop, felt so good every time .

My last week I was mainly painting a “house” inside, that was meant to be for accommodation on the farm further on. Days were going extremely slow that last week, properly because I found a display of a digital watch in the scrapyard and used it to keep track of time, but of cause the down side was that I kept looking at it every 5 minutes :S. Well in that same week heaps of people left and the farm was in serious need of new workers. A few people arrived 2 days before I left, and I helped sorting them out, but at that time I had developed a negative attitude towards Tong Park (due to various things), so I basically told them about all the stuff that didn’t work, how people were treated and so on (note: the 2 guys left Tong Park not long after myself).

The last hour at Tong Park was just horrible, never has time passed so slow in my life, all the time I was just thinking about all the travels that were lying in front of me and how awesome it was going to be. When we were told it was enough for the day I jumped in the car with my mate and we rushed up to the main office in car, it just felt great knowing that my days at Tong Park were all over now, and from now on it was all fun! Once I reached the main office I got my papers that I had to send to the immigration office for my second visa and after that I jumped on the bus and went home; it felt f***ing good knowing that I never had to put my foot there anymore!

Now I’m just sitting here in front of the TV with a beer writing this post and thinking how great it’s all gonna be !

Well, that was all for now, I’ll inform you again once I get my second year visa, until then, take care folks!

I know the title sounds a little lame, but I have really stopped counting days a while ago because time was moving too slow (well it still is quirt frankly xD).

Well some time has passed since my boss had the accident, and news is that he is going to make it! He might have problems doing different activities but he’s gonna make it, and that’s the important!!

I’ve certainly been a lot around on the farm doing different stuff, it seems like the general manager (who is my new boss now) has got a little more control over what he can get us to do (only a little though xD). We have been driving a little more than usual because we’ve been doing manly jobs that required shorter time to finish. Another change (on the past week that is) is that we have been ordered to go single on most of the jobs, reason being the manager thinks we will work faster that way. In my opinion it might be the opposite many of the times, especially when it comes to moving heavy objects or other two-man jobs like putting ventilation fans in!

It has definably got warmer at the farm; it’s just great weather at the moment. During these last 3 nights I’ve actually had my electric blanket turned completely off, it’s great (I’m just thinking back on my first freezing nights right now)! Oh another clear indicator that spring has finally arrived is that we have seen a lot of snakes recently (some really nasty ones),  and returning to the new “one-man” policy, that is another reason why I think we should work in pairs; example: I’m down at China Town (the scrap yard) browsing through some metal scraps, all of a sudden I remove a layer of metal and under is a brown snake (very poisonous) that strikes and bites me, many of the cars don’t have the two-way (similar to walkie-talkie) so I have to drive all the way up to the main office, and they’ll call a helicopter that can fly me to Brisbane, and in the meantime I might as well be dead!… and yes, they don’t have antivenom at the farm strange enough!

Ah just another thing before finishing; remember how I said that people looked a little down at me because I wasn’t so fast, well, it’s more or less over now, I’m working at a good pace and everything seems to be fine, even the Asian guy is being less an asshole now.

Well, that might be it from now; I really don’t want to go into details with what we are doing at the farm because it’s really boring stuff, so let’s just stop it here without making it any longer xD.

Till next time; have a good one

I’ll jump straight into it without making too much of a story out of it! Yesterday my boss got electrocuted at the farm while moving a silo with a crane. What happened was that my boss was on the ground stabilising a silo being moved by a crane; what the crane driver didn’t see was that there were some industrial power lines just over them! The crane hits the line and the massive voltage was transferred from the crane through the silo to my boss! He was transferred with a helicopter to Brisbane hospital in critical condition. He’s arm was popped open, his shoulder was broken, his feet were more or less exploded (he was wearing steel-cap boots) and worst of all, he have had a massive amount of voltage going through his body that could easily have killed him on the spot!!

I pray for my life that he will make it; he is a strong person with heaps of “go-power” so why shouldn’t he!!

The past month (approx.) has been passing by very slow; even though we are around doing different stuff almost every day now. As you can imagine from the title I managed to hurt myself some days ago, here is how it went.

Well it wasn’t long time since my real boss had returned from Bali, so work was at a normal rate again. I was down working with my good Aussie friend on a project that the other boss had given us some days before; we were basically flooring a room and putting small pens in there for the pigs to give birth in. We were given a small drill with a drill-bit that had served its time ages ago; so as you could imagine the work was going very slow! Dylan (my friend) drilled for quirt some time but it was very had because you had to constantly have heaps of pressure on the drill to enable it to drill; so after some time we went for a switch. I got the warm drill in my hand and I started drilling, after less than 20 seconds the drill exploded (with a big blue spark/flame) in my hand and I start feeling pain in my right leg that had been on the side of the drill (I was drilling from a crouched position to be able to put more pressure on the drill). I drop the drill and look at my leg; what I see is a big black circle on the overalls. I therefor take them off to have a look at my leg, and on there is another black circle, I limped to a water hose and started cleaning the scar. The black circle washes away and it left a much smaller round scar on about 3cm in diameter and a much bigger 20 diameter of skin without any hair on at all. Dylan and I agreed that I was ready to work again because I didn’t have to put that much pressure on the leg anyway. We try out the drill again to see if it works but its stone-dead! So we go up to the main office where the general farm manager and my boss are; they both have a look at the drill and confirm it’s dead! After they have a look at my leg but I say it’s not that serious (it didn’t look very serious either after I washed it). Then the general farm manager gives us the fault for breaking the drill on purpose so we couldn’t work more (we had been complaining about the work that same day due to the very bad drill bit), anyway what can we say, it’s obvious that the drill exploded due to extensive use! After that I did an incident report just to be sure in case the scar was infected and needed special attention; and that’s more or less the end of that story.

There has now passed 4 days since the accident and it’s coming along all fine, no problem at all, though it still looks a bit strange having that huge bit of my leg missing hair .

Well that was all for now guys, I’ll keep you updated if something important happens!

See ya

Ok, I’m gonna try to make it a little shorter this time compared to my last post 3 weeks ago.

The Monday after my first week I started working in the big sheaths; the job sounded simple, tearing old single-pig boxes down and setting up new large 20 pig pens. It definitely took a week or 2 getting completely into it; but once you’re organised in the group things go fast, I just have to think a little more for myself and ask much less (it’s really the complete opposite from my old “monkey job” back in Sydney). Now my next aim is to get a little faster; I know all the people I work with have worked much longer than me, but still, I’ve been working at the farm a month now, shouldn’t be that hard getting a little faster, even for a lazy person like myself xD! Well I really didn’t know if saying this but well, here it goes. I have to admit that work is not too good the past week, cuz there’s this Asian dude I work with, and he really is a pain in the ass, he knows I’m the slowest and he does everything to let me know so that really sucks; well, I have wide shoulders so a little offence here and there don’t make me flick, but it’s still very annoying, because it really makes me feel like shit at the end of the day!

On the same Monday that I started working with the other maintenance guys I went straight to the biggest supermarket in town to buy myself an electric blanket, and I got to say, it really helped a lot; as I said in the last post it got a little warmer after the first night, but still horrible; with the electric blanket those days were over; you can’t imagine how much I enjoyed that first night with the blanket, at last a good night’s sleep after a horrible freezing week!

Another good gadget I’ve bought recently was an internet stick; now I can get on the internet and check up on all the things I want when I have the time. With my provider I could choose from 2 different plans, one where you pay per megabyte, and another one where you pay 3$ and you get the whole day with unlimited navigation; I’m on the last of those two plans, and I’m only using it in the week-end when I have got time off (and nothing else to do), it’s extreme good value this way, so glad I bought it !

Well, talking about work again; me and my team have finally finished with our converting pig pens job, and it sure feels good doing different stuff again! So what is different stuff? Well I’ll just go short over some of the stuff we have been doing recently without going into details. Well, we have been driving stuff around, fixing water pipes, changing nipples (I know it sounds crazy, but I can assure you it isn’t), concreting, repairing feed trays and putting in feed pipes; that should be it for the past days.

Well without making it much longer I’d just end it here, because that is more or less everything that has happened at work LOL.

Stay safe my friends; I’ll properly come up with a new update in a month or so, take care

p.s. That was shorter than my last post, good on me hehe

So here I am after a week working at Tong Park, I really have to get used to this, it’s so different from anything I’ve ever done, but more of that later, let’s begin from the start !

Well, I arrived at Dalby (which is situated around 250km from Brisbane) on a Monday evening. I got off the bus and waited at Hungry Jack’s as instructed; after about 30 minutes a car pulled up and I got to meet the woman that was going to “install” me in my new Dalby house. I was told that the farm was about 45km from Dalby, and that it was below zero in average many of the nights. Well, arriving at the house I got introduced to my new house-mates; 2 Burmese dudes and a Dutch guy.  The 2 Burmese guys didn’t talk much English at all so after some tries I started talking to the Dutch guy. He was a very “closed” person so I really had problems starting a conversation with him; I started asking questions but they were all meet with a “no-answer answer”; let me just give you some examples. Me: “So how is it working at Tong Park?” him: “Well, it’s a work…what is there to say (then all silence)”, me: “So for how many hours are we working?” him “It depends”, me: “What about the pay then, it’s 18.50$ per hour right?” him “It depends, some gets paid more”, me: “So do you get paid 18.50$ per hour or what?” him “yeah, something like that”, me: “So when do we get up in the morning?” him” Well, really depends if you are a morning person or not”, me “Well, how long a drive is it in the morning to the farm then?” him “I don’t really know”, me: “Well, approximately, you know, is it like a 2 minutes’ drive or rather like a 2 hour drive?” him: “Nah, it isn’t 2 hours”; and so on. I could see that the conversation wasn’t getting anywhere so I just went, “well, guess I’m better off just finding out by myself, isn’t that right?”, it was (obviously) meet with silence; so instead of talking I just went onto watching TV; Bear Grylls was on, and he was trying to get warm with some fire in a cave, and that really got me feeling that it was beginning to get cold. At around 9 o’clock it was starting to get very cold, and my house mates were starting to go to bed, so I thought I’d do the same. There was nothing on my bed (linen, pillow, and so on) so all I had my lightweight summer sleeping bag! Some hours after the light got turned off I still weren’t fallen asleep, it had got super-cold and I was totally rolled together, all shivering, trying to get warm, but my summer sleeping bag was definitely not gonna help me on that one! I think that I didn’t sleep more than one hour that whole night, it really was my coldest night ever in my entire life; you could see the condense when I was breathing, so I’m sure it was around zero degrees in the house!! I kept thinking about Bear Grylls tips on how to get warm and how a fire would do wonders in this situation, but then again, turning on a fire in the house would properly be a bad idea.

Well my Dutch roommate got up at around 4:30am, and I (of cause) was already awake so I just followed. After some breakfast we caught the bus out to the farm situated about 1km from a tiny village called Warra. After about 50 minutes we arrived at the farm, and we started going towards a smaller (on-farm) bus, then I was (finally) helped by the Dutch guy who told that I was due to wait at the main office instead of following the group, and so I did. The office wasn’t opened yet so I had to wait outside for about an hour, and it was still freezing (my body was still in dead cold after the long night). Well after the office folks arrived I got in and began signing papers, I think I must have put my signature around 50 different places, it was insane (had to sign that I understood every single rule separately); I’m pretty sure an hour or so passed by just doing that. I was put on the farm maintenance team, so most common duties would include moving stuff, building stuff and tearing stuff down.

Well after my introduction it was time to work, I was given a car that I had to connect to a trailer and then take it to another station. After finding the station I had to reverse the car with the trailer through a small gate, thing was I’d never before backed up a trailer in my life, and just to make it worse it was even my first time driving a car with the steering wheel in the right side. So as you can imagine I struggled a little getting that trailer through the stupid gate. It took me about 5 tries till I got it right, but I was still kind of satisfied about my effort being the first time doing it ever! After I had to manually load old pig feeding trays to the trailer and then finally drive them down to the scrapyard (also called China Town xD). That continued on for the whole day. When I got home I went straight to bed without having dinner, because that first day loading pig trays really tired me out, to not talk about that silly hour of sleep I had the night before. That night it wasn’t as cold as the first, so I managed to get more sleep compared to my first night, even though it was still super cold.

The following days were pretty much the same as my first day, well without the signature stuff though . I’ve been told that I have to begin working in one of the stables with the other maintenance guys (so far I’ve been working alone); kind of liked my little caring around job, it’s not that bad once you get used to it.  I hope my new building pig pens job will be quirt good as well when I start again on Monday; there is nothing else to do than to hope for the best!

Well that was all for now guys, I will post again in a month or so when I’m 100% into my new job (hopefully).

Until then take care folks!