d77 Friday the 13th

Its been a tough and sometimes frustrating couple of weeks since last posting, there is still allot of building work going on in the stadium which is hindering progress somewhat and the show is around 2 month away. Working in the stadium you kind of become familiar with some of the local workers and saying hello saying stuff and completely not understanding each other. One of the local beam climbers was saying “Firma Vasha many ne vozimut narabotu”  then he wrote it on the handrail. I took a picture and asked Micky, our Russian Ittalian rigger to translate. He said it means, your company will never take me or worlds to that effect, still don’t quite understand what my mate the beam climber was trying to say but we still say hello.

The temperature has started to drop and one time when I went in the office, Terry said she was having issues with her computer, could I come have a look. The cat from the cafe had made its nest on the warm keyboard, its quite a funny cheeky cat and wanders round the caffe most lunchtimes.

Rob and myself spent a duple of days addressing and commissioning some automation cabinets then once we had done there was another firmware upgrade so had to go and do it again, no doubt as things get requested theres still going to be more upgrades, still lot to do.

The sunsets are still amazing here over the sea, the colours are always a similar hue, i think a day or two after this is when we had “The Storm”

Im onto nightshifts now, and the second day in the dayshift and nightshift was cancelled due to adverse weather conditions. In this case adverse weather conditions meant winds  high strong gusty winds, heavy rain, thunder and lighting. I was in my room when i got the email saying it had been cancelled and i could actually feel the hotel shaking. Later i met some of the dayshift who had had gone into work before the the announcement saying the shift had been canceled. They had to sit in the canteen for 4 hours whilst the situation was assessed. In this time some roof panels had been blown off some of the buildings which was holding our automation equipment, and much of it got wet.

The following day, the dayshift began the carful drying of the electrics and electronics before tentatively switching on different elements. When we went in for the nightshift the temperature began to drop into the minus meaning some of the equipment which wasn’t fully dried began to form ice inside.

Its actually quite depressing, easily a 2 week set back, if not more, we’ve spent the past 3 days slowly powering stuff up and re testing when we should be programming a show. Hopefully we will have more access equipment tonight so we can get more done at height. It really does feel like 1 step forward and 10 steps back at the moment, even with the building work in the stadium, allot of the floor tiling has been finished on some of the concourses, then other local contractors come in and dump steel work stillages on the concourse smashing many many tiles. Along side the amount of times I’ve seen concrete poured then dug up again because of a forgotten pipe or something is just madness.

For a cheery end to this post, heres another face, whey!