THURSDAY 9 NOVEMBER     NORTH POINT CAMP

Temperature in the mid 40’s today, and it was humid.

John took a load to the tip. Spotless was generating a large amount of rubbish now, too.

I inducted more Spotless staff, and continued phone discussions with the office manufacturer about the missing air cons, and missing roof flashing. HO had batted it back to me!

John bought the required air con units – 16 of them – in Hedland. I reckon there can’t be too many left in the town now! I think he had fun, walking into shops and nonchalantly saying “I want to buy 16 split system air conditioners, immediately!”

The new kitchen freezer module compressor burnt out. The manufacturing  company was slow to respond about this. Our remote distance was such a handicap in dealing with firms. I phoned around, couldn’t find anyone in Hedland that was available in a short time, and eventually arranged for a company to come up from Newman to fix the mobile cool room unit and source a new compressor for us. That was going to add some extra to the travel costs component of the account!

This sort of negotiating and purchasing was not something I’d envisaged as part of this job. I was spending so much time on the phone, chasing up faults, and sourcing fixers. I found it hard to credit that the people running the project in HO were happy to leave this stuff to me – I would have thought they knew more than me about it all, but at times it did not seem so.

And rooms had been numbered along each SPQ donga

 A temporary gas cyclinder for the kitchen was delivered and tested, but not connected up yet.

An extra chore arose, that was going to be a real pest, even though the company would be paid extra as a contingency. Our staff had to fill the big generators here, and at the bore, from the fuel tank at Fly Camp i.e. ferrying fuel. Time and labour were issues here, with so much pressure on us to use every available man to get the camp ready for hand over. The need for fuel was something that FMG should have foreseen. There had been too many issues where they had not planned or followed through – starting with the delayed site access at the start!

One of the three ice machines had been hooked up, outside my office, to try out and  had broken down. The Canter small truck had broken down. Everything was being pushed to its limit.

The Spotless bosses continued to really annoy me. They were acting like the whole site had already been handed over to them – and my office ditto.