Knuckling Down

Our work has begun! Finally we are not just in Texas, but we are working too. I'm not really allowed to talk much about what we are working on, but I can say we are doing an audit.

With all the new systems I will soon be learning about there come also the manuals to use them properly. This is very important because we are operating and maintaining aircraft and if we don't follow the rules the plane could crash, and we all know crash=death. So we have lots of publications and manuals which we have to use whenever we operate or try to fix the equipment. Because the equipment and the systems are brand new, the publications are still being written.

So... here we are, making sure that what the contractors are writing is not just in line with the way the systems work, but also in line with the way we like our manuals to be written. Because some of the people working on the pubs are not engineers, but technical writers or editors this can be a very frustrating process. Fortunately for me I am coming into the end of it - after about two years the publications are over 70% complete, and all I have to do at this stage is make sure that requested changes have actually been incorporated.
Have I bored you all to death? Well the work I'm doing is even drier!!!

On the upside, they have allocated us two weeks to get the work done. We've been at it for two days and we reckon we'll be done by the end of tomorrow. That's the Maintenance Team anyway (my team). I'm not sure how the Operators are going.

After we finish auditing the publications we are going to audit the training package. This is the funny part, because after we audit the training package we will then go on the courses we have just audited! We will be checking everything about the training except for the tests. It doesn't stop there. Once we are on the course, we will then be doing more than an audit. We'll be doing full-on verification of both the pubs and the training. We'll be looking for mistakes, inconsistencies and discrepancies between the two, and from manual to manual.
Did I mention we have to pass the tests too? By the end of it each one of us will be the authority in our respective area. And that's a scary notion.

It's only been two days at work but I think I'm settling into a routine. There's little to do here and the books I ordered haven't turned up, so I enjoy cooking dinner (for once) because it actually gives me something to do. I have two hotplates, a microwave, one pot and a tiny fry pan. I don't have any microwave bowls but I have crockery. This has made cooking an interesting adventure as I have to think very carefully about what foods are going to go in which pot/pan and when. It's worked out so far, but the first night I cooked the spuds, then needed the same pot for the mince. Lucky you can eat potatoes cold eh?

Okay well I won't bore you anymore, I just wanted to brag about how fast we've been on this audit. No doubt I will have more to add at the end of the week about how wrong I was. Karma might yet be mentioned.




Till We Meet Again,
JLS