Feb & March 21010 News

My goodness how time flies when you are busy. There I was sitting at work, bored out of my skull and wishing and praying for something to come up to help me get through the 8 hours in each working day. Being bored I then applied for an internal position and did not think that I would be considered as I have little exact experience and is probably over qualified. I regarded this as a long-term solution to my fear of losing my job if this company should go belly up. After a lot of ructions and misunderstandings among management and the preferred guy, I was eventually offered the job and I accepted.


I am now the EMS Service Rep for Asia pacific area for support of the Cospas-Sarsat Satellite equipment that EMS Global Tracking supplies worldwide. This system has several Satellites in Low Earth Orbit (weather satellites) and Geo Stationary satellites that receive signals when a distress beacon (EPIRB) is activated. The satellite relays the signal down to earth to strategically placed antennas and receiver systems. These systems decode the signal to determine where it originated and then assist rescue personnel to guide the rescue effort to locate the beacon.

I am responsible for the Pacific area consisting of Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Taiwan, and also South Africa. I will visit these sites at least once a year to do preventative maintenance (like servicing your car) and to update it when required.

I am travelling quite a bit at the moment and on average is away from home 3 of 8 weeks. This will reduce (I trust) when I have completed my training. It was nice to visit new places like Albany and Bundaberg where the antennas are located as well as Canberra where the Control Centre is.

I was just wondering if I should be pleased that they are willing to pay me a Senior System Engineers Salary to do maintenance work or whether I should be upset that they have been paying me a maintenance technician salary all along!

Carina also managed to move to a different centre as she just could not get along with the boss and her sidekick. Although the atmosphere and work conditions have improved, we have decided that she will quit the studies as it is disrupting our family too much with me away from home so much and her not being here and tired most the time. They are really treated like slave labour: have to work most weekends and public holidays with leave being refused because others have higher priority while being paid minimum wage. Michael and I to take a lot of blame for this decision as we also did not keep our side of the bargain to assist with cleaning and helping with the house chores. We did some but we could have done so much more. At least she tried her best.

Michael won 4 of the 7 athletics events that the school hosted for his age and came second in another. They are now competing in ever widening local regional events till it gets to state level and country level. He won the 100, 200 and 800m races as well as the ‘ball “gooing” thing’ (shot-put) but was only selected for the 800m and shot-put. We are giving little extra training as I don’t want to push too hard this early stage.

I got the first really big gout attack in Oz and discovered that the usual Cortisone & Voltaren injection is not available here. It is a government medical aid and they are scared of being sued by 0.03% of cases where it can become infected when the Dr messes up the injection. Needless to say I have been suffering for over a week. Given that I could now only consume a few food types also coincided with Carina deciding that I should lose a few kg. We got the Body Trim System diet from our neighbours Di and John. It should actually not be called a diet as you have to change the way you eat for life. It is based on the many low carb or high protein diets doing the rounds at the moment. You are not allowed carbs or starch after lunch, eat 3 meals and 3 protein snacks every three hours but can eat as much green veggies and salads with every main meal. The centimeters are going fast and the kilos are slowly coming down. Hope that I don’t have to bend the rules too much with all the travels coming up, especially 2 weeks to Taiwan.