Time for a short post.
My guitar has had this annoying buzz on it for months now, and I finally got around to fixing it, which basically meant opening it up, finding the buzz (a slightly loose structural support beam) and gluing it solid. No big deal, but I’ve been avoiding guitar practice for AGES because it annoyed me so much that I couldnt’ play. It took me half an hour to fix, and now I’ve been practicing every day since.
Moral of the tale: Um. Do I really need to tell you?
Time for a short post.
My guitar has had this annoying buzz on it for months now, and I finally got around to fixing it, which basically meant opening it up, finding the buzz (a slightly loose structural support beam) and gluing it solid. No big deal, but I’ve been avoiding guitar practice for AGES because it annoyed me so much that I couldnt’ play. It took me half an hour to fix, and now I’ve been practicing every day since.
Moral of the tale: Um. Do I really need to tell you?
Greetings.
It is I, author of this blog, and spokesperson of the incredibly inconsideratly inactive bloggers foundation of Doulos, and I have returned! Yea, verily, verily, etc.
So. It’s been 5 weeks since I last posted, roughly. And it has been quite a busy, time, yes, of course, that’s the way it is around here. And is that an excuse for not blogging? Well, probably not. But I’ll use it as an excuse anyway.
We’re currently sailing between Kuching, Malaysia, where we spent Christmas and New Year, to Cebu, Philippines, where we were 2 years ago.
Every 6 months or so we get a new batch of recruits, who go for 2 weeks of safety training, and that group of people is usually fairly “clannish”, and are known as the “Preship” group of whichever port they did their training. So I’m from the “Sharjah Preship”. Other famous past examples would be the Manila Preship, Banjul Preship, Istanbul Preship, etc, etc.
Anyway, 2 years ago we had the Cebu Preship join us, and they’ll mostly be leaving in the next month or so, and the next group of recruits will also be doing their training in Cebu… This is NOT normal. It’s the first time we’ve had this, ever, to popular knowledge. Normally it’s at least 7 or 8 years between being back in the same place at the same rough time to be able to do this, so every Preship is a different city.
This might seem like a very minor thing, and from a completely outside viewpoint, it is. However, Doulos isn’t just a ship full of people from different places, we also have a very strong Doulos Culture, which has devleopped over the decades as result of our rules, regulations, work habits, and the bizarre lifestyle which we have on board.
“Preship” groups are almost like your family, or clan. Whenever someone gets up to say something in a community meeting, for instance at the end of a port when we get together to share stories of what we (and God) have been up to, most people will introduce themselves with something like “Hi, My name is Daniel, and I’m from Cyprus, and the Sharjah Preship!” or whatever. At this point, everyone else from Sharjah will shout and scream or chant, or whatever.
OK, so the people from Sharjah probably won’t, since there’s only about 5 of us left, and we never managed to get a chant to work properly, but everyone from all the other active preships on board will for their people. So, to have two groups of people from different Preships, with the same name, is a bit weird. It’s like having two football teams with the same name. If they played each other, who would you cheer for?
So. There’s a random piece of Doulos culture for you. Now for some thoughts about it.
We are incredibly clannish, and seem, as humans, as christians, and as Douloi, to have an innate capacity to draw lines between each other, and to divide on the slightest pretext. And partly I object to the amount that the training department push Preship identity during the training. I can also see the side whereby this “Preship ” concept can be used positively to establish a home base and place for people to live and identify themselves in the community.
And identity is such a weird thing. Who are we? The good evangelical in me says something like “My identity is in Christ alone! All other things are slag!” And yeah, yeah. OK, so that is true, of course. But we do all seem to use boxes, either rigid or flexible, to put people and everything into. We constantly talk about getting “out of the box” and “not putting people in boxes”, but is that really practical? People’s individuality MUST trump any box we put them into, and anyone MUST be able to climb out of that box, and we must not dump people into boxes and judge them there and leave them forever, but is it possible to truly not create comparisons and labels?
Some days I get really fed up of the boxes and labels, and try to rebel.
“Hey! Are you the AV guy?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. Who is working tonight then?”
“I am. I work here, but I’m not the AV guy. I’m Daniel.”
I don’t know. Enough rambling. It’s time for sleep.
Greetings.
It is I, author of this blog, and spokesperson of the incredibly inconsideratly inactive bloggers foundation of Doulos, and I have returned! Yea, verily, verily, etc.
So. It’s been 5 weeks since I last posted, roughly. And it has been quite a busy, time, yes, of course, that’s the way it is around here. And is that an excuse for not blogging? Well, probably not. But I’ll use it as an excuse anyway.
We’re currently sailing between Kuching, Malaysia, where we spent Christmas and New Year, to Cebu, Philippines, where we were 2 years ago.
Every 6 months or so we get a new batch of recruits, who go for 2 weeks of safety training, and that group of people is usually fairly “clannish”, and are known as the “Preship” group of whichever port they did their training. So I’m from the “Sharjah Preship”. Other famous past examples would be the Manila Preship, Banjul Preship, Istanbul Preship, etc, etc.
Anyway, 2 years ago we had the Cebu Preship join us, and they’ll mostly be leaving in the next month or so, and the next group of recruits will also be doing their training in Cebu… This is NOT normal. It’s the first time we’ve had this, ever, to popular knowledge. Normally it’s at least 7 or 8 years between being back in the same place at the same rough time to be able to do this, so every Preship is a different city.
This might seem like a very minor thing, and from a completely outside viewpoint, it is. However, Doulos isn’t just a ship full of people from different places, we also have a very strong Doulos Culture, which has devleopped over the decades as result of our rules, regulations, work habits, and the bizarre lifestyle which we have on board.
“Preship” groups are almost like your family, or clan. Whenever someone gets up to say something in a community meeting, for instance at the end of a port when we get together to share stories of what we (and God) have been up to, most people will introduce themselves with something like “Hi, My name is Daniel, and I’m from Cyprus, and the Sharjah Preship!” or whatever. At this point, everyone else from Sharjah will shout and scream or chant, or whatever.
OK, so the people from Sharjah probably won’t, since there’s only about 5 of us left, and we never managed to get a chant to work properly, but everyone from all the other active preships on board will for their people. So, to have two groups of people from different Preships, with the same name, is a bit weird. It’s like having two football teams with the same name. If they played each other, who would you cheer for?
So. There’s a random piece of Doulos culture for you. Now for some thoughts about it.
We are incredibly clannish, and seem, as humans, as christians, and as Douloi, to have an innate capacity to draw lines between each other, and to divide on the slightest pretext. And partly I object to the amount that the training department push Preship identity during the training. I can also see the side whereby this “Preship ” concept can be used positively to establish a home base and place for people to live and identify themselves in the community.
And identity is such a weird thing. Who are we? The good evangelical in me says something like “My identity is in Christ alone! All other things are slag!” And yeah, yeah. OK, so that is true, of course. But we do all seem to use boxes, either rigid or flexible, to put people and everything into. We constantly talk about getting “out of the box” and “not putting people in boxes”, but is that really practical? People’s individuality MUST trump any box we put them into, and anyone MUST be able to climb out of that box, and we must not dump people into boxes and judge them there and leave them forever, but is it possible to truly not create comparisons and labels?
Some days I get really fed up of the boxes and labels, and try to rebel.
“Hey! Are you the AV guy?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. Who is working tonight then?”
“I am. I work here, but I’m not the AV guy. I’m Daniel.”
I don’t know. Enough rambling. It’s time for sleep.
The sweat drips from my nose, and splashes, sizzling, onto the soldering iron.
It’s roasting hot, and the cables are all around me, as squashed into a small space behind the audio rack I put the finishing touches to the new audio lines I just ran across from the desk opposite.
It’s dry-dock again.My third, now, and this time, I’m just not enjoying it.
I have quite a lot on my plate at the moment, what with trying to sort out many technical issues in the A/V equipment, and also get as much as possible done to allow us to expand and use what we have better throughout this coming year.
Also, the other members of the A/V team are busy with other projects, and I’m helping out a bit again with the deck ladder-repair and making crew.
Bink!
That’s the sound that the lights make when blackouts happen.
We just had another powercut.
Vrum bzzzzzt! Klunk! Klunk! Klunkklunkklunkduhduhduhduh!
That’s the sound that the fanrooms make when the power comes back on again.
The power just came back on again, by the way.
So, anyway. Right.
Yeah, there’s another fairly huge but unofficial project on which has pretty much sucked all the free time out of one of my team for the last 10 months – even from well before he joined AV – and also has been increasingly impinging upon the time of the rest of us.
They created an(other) unrealistic deadline to finish it before the end of this drydock, and I knew he would push all his time and energy into it.
So I pretty much gave him his work time to get this thing finished.
Which is good, I guess.
I mean, he’s not dead, which if we’d pushed hard at the AV jobs as well, I think he would be.
He just wouldn’t have slept at all.
We barely did anyway.
I was up until 3 one night working on an animation for the project.
Anyway.
Many of the AV tasks I had (I wrote down 58 jobs I’d have liked to either do, or investigate the feasibility of) have not been done, and most of them I didn’t even get a chance to investigate how possible they were.
So.. somewhat frustrating.
The first version is done now, which is good.
Anyway.
Still plenty of logistics and miscommunication issues to sort out.
So.
What else…
I’ve been making sure I keep time for myself, not burning out, and part of that includes focussing more on painting and artwork.. we’ve begun “creative communities” on board – basically an internal art/photography/creative writing club, with picking a theme per month.
The theme last month was “Freedom”.
This month it’s “Love”.
Here’s a painting of mine – “Searching for Love”
I helped out a bit with the ladderwork again this drydock.
Pretty much the same as last year.. this time we stretched the rope slightly more thoroughly.. Check out before and after stretching:
Quite impressive.
I feel somewhat drawn out and stretched myself.
I don’t think I’ll snap.. but hopefully I’ll be all the more resilient to whatever life throws at me in the future because of it.
And my current work in progress.
The sweat drips from my nose, and splashes, sizzling, onto the soldering iron.
It’s roasting hot, and the cables are all around me, as squashed into a small space behind the audio rack I put the finishing touches to the new audio lines I just ran across from the desk opposite.
It’s dry-dock again.My third, now, and this time, I’m just not enjoying it.
I have quite a lot on my plate at the moment, what with trying to sort out many technical issues in the A/V equipment, and also get as much as possible done to allow us to expand and use what we have better throughout this coming year.
Also, the other members of the A/V team are busy with other projects, and I’m helping out a bit again with the deck ladder-repair and making crew.
Bink!
That’s the sound that the lights make when blackouts happen.
We just had another powercut.
Vrum bzzzzzt! Klunk! Klunk! Klunkklunkklunkduhduhduhduh!
That’s the sound that the fanrooms make when the power comes back on again.
The power just came back on again, by the way.
So, anyway. Right.
Yeah, there’s another fairly huge but unofficial project on which has pretty much sucked all the free time out of one of my team for the last 10 months – even from well before he joined AV – and also has been increasingly impinging upon the time of the rest of us.
They created an(other) unrealistic deadline to finish it before the end of this drydock, and I knew he would push all his time and energy into it.
So I pretty much gave him his work time to get this thing finished.
Which is good, I guess.
I mean, he’s not dead, which if we’d pushed hard at the AV jobs as well, I think he would be.
He just wouldn’t have slept at all.
We barely did anyway.
I was up until 3 one night working on an animation for the project.
Anyway.
Many of the AV tasks I had (I wrote down 58 jobs I’d have liked to either do, or investigate the feasibility of) have not been done, and most of them I didn’t even get a chance to investigate how possible they were.
So.. somewhat frustrating.
The first version is done now, which is good.
Anyway.
Still plenty of logistics and miscommunication issues to sort out.
So.
What else…
I’ve been making sure I keep time for myself, not burning out, and part of that includes focussing more on painting and artwork.. we’ve begun “creative communities” on board – basically an internal art/photography/creative writing club, with picking a theme per month.
The theme last month was “Freedom”.
This month it’s “Love”.
Here’s a painting of mine – “Searching for Love”
I helped out a bit with the ladderwork again this drydock.
Pretty much the same as last year.. this time we stretched the rope slightly more thoroughly.. Check out before and after stretching:
Quite impressive.
I feel somewhat drawn out and stretched myself.
I don’t think I’ll snap.. but hopefully I’ll be all the more resilient to whatever life throws at me in the future because of it.
And my current work in progress.
Well… it’s been busy.
It is busy!
We’ve left Australia, and are sailing currently to East Timor. The programme team have a new manager, who is bent on reforming them and is changing many ways of working, becoming more team based:
brainstorming rather than ivory tower development of programmes,
Flexi-time working, everyone chipping in rather than fixed hours, and so on.
The AV team isn’t really part of the programmes team (go figure), but we work a lot with them, and so I’ve been trying to push my team into being at as much of this voyage’s programme team time as possible. Attending devotions with them, being at the creativity sessions, and so on.
This morning we had a fairly good session, which I led, I was trying to get them to think outside of the box in reguards to how we use our venue. The on board “Main Lounge” is most frequently set up with all the programme happening in one “stage” section at the front, and then rows of chairs at the back, or tables in a cafe setting. Often the most transformation the room gets is having curtains put up, perhaps fairy lights and lots of flags (you know, the whole international thing).
Anyway. We can do so much more. Once we started imagining things, ideas like turning the whole room into a Japanese Garden, with an island in the middle and a moat and bridges and stuff came up. Building a slum from Manilla out of the whole room, hanging the curtains to turn it into a ginormous beduin-style tent, and so on. One group even thought of having a “Indiana Jones” type set up, with different areas of the lounge being different places around the world, tying up some of the audience with a knife suspended above their head and then dropping it on them if their team-mates didn’t answer the questions of a quiz correctly…
Some of the ideas may take a little modifying. Health and Safety, you know.
Still, it was a good session, and then we looked through a lot of our video clips collection, to talk about what we can use, how we can use videos we have more effectively, and so on.
This evening was the weekly prayer-night, which this week was being run by the on board School. It was somewhat chaotic, as these kinds of things are wont to be.
Anyway, the guy who was leading the musicy part of it didn’t bring me a song list at all (which is mentioned on the pre-event A/V form, which he otherwise did fill in), and then half an hour before we began, during his sound check time, he brought up two new songs which needed to be entered into the database while I was trying to sound check them… He know’s it’s supposed to be 24 hours before an event that they give in any new songs.
Still, I told him off, but put the songs in anyway. So, quite hectic. It all went really well in the end, and sounded pretty good, all the songs worked, and so on. Apparently I made an impression on him though, as after the evening was finished, he showed up at the sound desk with a large bar of chocolate to say sorry for being so late all the time!! Amazing!
Well… it’s been busy.
It is busy!
We’ve left Australia, and are sailing currently to East Timor. The programme team have a new manager, who is bent on reforming them and is changing many ways of working, becoming more team based:
brainstorming rather than ivory tower development of programmes,
Flexi-time working, everyone chipping in rather than fixed hours, and so on.
The AV team isn’t really part of the programmes team (go figure), but we work a lot with them, and so I’ve been trying to push my team into being at as much of this voyage’s programme team time as possible. Attending devotions with them, being at the creativity sessions, and so on.
This morning we had a fairly good session, which I led, I was trying to get them to think outside of the box in reguards to how we use our venue. The on board “Main Lounge” is most frequently set up with all the programme happening in one “stage” section at the front, and then rows of chairs at the back, or tables in a cafe setting. Often the most transformation the room gets is having curtains put up, perhaps fairy lights and lots of flags (you know, the whole international thing).
Anyway. We can do so much more. Once we started imagining things, ideas like turning the whole room into a Japanese Garden, with an island in the middle and a moat and bridges and stuff came up. Building a slum from Manilla out of the whole room, hanging the curtains to turn it into a ginormous beduin-style tent, and so on. One group even thought of having a “Indiana Jones” type set up, with different areas of the lounge being different places around the world, tying up some of the audience with a knife suspended above their head and then dropping it on them if their team-mates didn’t answer the questions of a quiz correctly…
Some of the ideas may take a little modifying. Health and Safety, you know.
Still, it was a good session, and then we looked through a lot of our video clips collection, to talk about what we can use, how we can use videos we have more effectively, and so on.
This evening was the weekly prayer-night, which this week was being run by the on board School. It was somewhat chaotic, as these kinds of things are wont to be.
Anyway, the guy who was leading the musicy part of it didn’t bring me a song list at all (which is mentioned on the pre-event A/V form, which he otherwise did fill in), and then half an hour before we began, during his sound check time, he brought up two new songs which needed to be entered into the database while I was trying to sound check them… He know’s it’s supposed to be 24 hours before an event that they give in any new songs.
Still, I told him off, but put the songs in anyway. So, quite hectic. It all went really well in the end, and sounded pretty good, all the songs worked, and so on. Apparently I made an impression on him though, as after the evening was finished, he showed up at the sound desk with a large bar of chocolate to say sorry for being so late all the time!! Amazing!
I’m working on another short film/video project. Here’s a few frames from it for your enjoyment.
I’m still quite tired and frustrated and so on, but a bit better. I’ve had a day off since my last post, which was good, and another few days off in the next few weeks too, so that’s good too. I’ll be writing a longer text blogpost soon.
I’m tired. I’m stressed.
I won’t pretend to hide it.
I’m pissed off at the system, thoroughly fed up of how things currently are – in my work, my life, and in many things around me.
Yet, still, most things are going fairly well…
I’m now the “AV manager”, and discovering more and more how disorganised and messed up it is.
We have small forms in the drawer under the computer which are used during the sunday service on board, we give out the little forms, then people can fill them in if they want to, so that they can give to the weekly offering (usually to help a local ministry, or work in India, or similar) direct from their on board account, rather than having to use cash.
Anyway, this morning, the guy running the service came up and asked for them.. We had 10. Not good enough! So, I told him a few ideas of who he could ask for more, but this was at half an hour before the service, on a Sunday Morning. Not the best time to go looking for people to do random work like that.
We need to have once a week or so someone to check how many we have, say on a Friday, and then to get at least 200 before the Sunday morning.
Not a big deal, right?
Well, no, not a problem at all. Just the problem is that there are *hundreds* of little issues like this. Every day. And *NONE* of them are written down. When I started, there were no current weekly checklists or anything.
I don’t want to become a lists and rules based dictator, but how on earth else do you manage to get everything done that needs to be?
When I took over this job, there was maybe 1 hour of discussion between me and the predecessor about stuff, but none of these little details were noted. Each day day I find mord
And it was the same thing when I became waterman, 2 years ago. There’s no consistancy! As soon as people leave, things get dropped.
It’s why ships tend to have such strict and over the top and detailed procedures – everything gets written down.
Anyway. It’s just intensely frustrating. I’m so bad at admin, so weak at organisation, so forgetful about details, so easily overwhelmed by situations, so inexperienced at leadership, so unknowledgeable about everything technical I should know about, so young!
I guess in one way it’s kind of exciting. I mean, whoopee! So much stuff to learn! So much I can improve!
Yet it’s kind of hard to say that and not at least have some irony and sarcasm in it too.
Yes, it’s good to be stretched and have all this improvement to do, but at the same time, it’s “live”. We’re not playing with blank bullets. Every round is for real.
Every time I start a video playing in a programme, it’s not school, not training. People are in the programme, watching, and notice if things don’t work.
The audience have paid, usually. The programme organiser has spend hours arranging everything, and if I screw up, it’s her work that gets ruined.
Trying to set priorites, and figure out what actually is realistic and achievable…
And then how to make sure it happens. And each day discovering more things which have got dropped and then not only do we need to carry it, but we have to stop, pick it up, clean it, do repairs on it, and then start carrying it again.
I could go on. My list of current frustrations and things we’re doing badly is pretty much endless.
And I know I’m a perfectionist, but this isn’t perfectionism.. This is realism.
Those are all itty bitty technical details. But they effect almost every programme we do.
And why?! Why have they not been fixed? And how can they be fixed easily, or at least dealt with, or worked around?
Well, they can. But we’re lacking any way to report problems, to deal with them, or do anything in a purposeful or directed way.
And it’s not just about technical details. Those are the easiest for me to see – of course – and those are the bits that are our job. From a programme side, this show up as mics dying unexpectedly, feedback, disruption, long pauses, lack of flow and professionalism, etc, etc, etc.
And we’ve all become so accepting of it! And that’s wrong. We cannot accept crap, when we are capable of beauty, and if we’re not capable of exquisite complex beauty, then we must simplfy until what we do is excellent at that level.
There’s so much attitude and team thinking that has to change too, and just as soon if not before the technical bits can get solved. I really am trying to focus on the people, in the team and those we work with/for, and that’s a topic for a whole other post, or possibly whole other blog. So I’ll just stick with the technical day to day bits today.
Everything is so reactive. Like the offering forms this morning. Having problems show up, and then deal with them.
Honestly, we – the ship – has been doing programmes for so long now that ALL of these things should have become non-issues. And once we can get out of this constanct scrambling to pick up the pieces of something that’s just exploded, or running around like headless chickens to stop something from exploding, then we can actually start enjoying it, and being creative and actually going somewhere positive and improving.
But man, it’s tiring right now.