Mr Dadang

I was just leaving the house on a blip expedition to the pond that I found yesterday, when at the same moment, my blip was delivered to my door, by my postman. Don't you just love it when that happens!

Introducing Mr.Dadang.

Unfortunately, the package was not the camera that I have eagerly been awaiting, but a new bank card that I have also been sweating over, as the old one has expired and I had no way of extracting money from the ATM machine until it arrived. My situation was not totally desperate however, as cash arrived from the shrimp fishing lure design a few days ago. But the post arrival does give us a glimmer of hope for the arrival of the camera, proving that they can at least find my house. According to tracking, the camera is actually in Indonesia, but once in the country, the tracking ceases I believe and the sweating begins.

Dadang, as you can see, is a jolly and relaxed chap of good nature. He tensed up in front of the camera, but within seconds I had him nice and relaxed again. I had to do a lot of color correction because of the jacket, out of the camera Dadang resembled a happy traffic cone, but the correction worked quite well.

The Bandung story - part 4

The travelling contractors life is not for everyone. You have to be good at the job and prepared to work hard, for long hours, away from family and friends for long periods. The pay off is indeed the pay off, which is more than double what you would earn in a normal job. The maximum hours permitted on this contract was 69 per week and this became the standard working week. No point in being here if you didn't work the maximum.

Because we worked hard, it stands to reason that we played hard too. The most important aspect of the contract is not the super working conditions or the standard of the hotel accommodation, the climatic conditions or the quality of the local food. It is all about getting the maximum hours in and the night life, the bar were the remaining waking hours are spent. Here in Bandung, we had hit the jackpot. The biggest problem was dragging yourself away in time to catch enough sleep for the daily cycle to continue.

A few of the guys were lucky enough to have wives that were prepared to follow their husbands around the jobs and their main job was to keep the husbands on track. The jobbers wife is a rare breed. I never really understood why, because their life was one of top hotels, shopping and pool side tropical sun. What more could you want.

The jobbers without wives in tow, sometimes struggled to keep on track and it is not unusual for one or two to be given their marching orders, but this team was solid and all stayed the course. There were no cliques, we were all one happy team, again this was unusual on a contract.

I remember one boisterous Saturday night, when the landlord came around with a freezer chilled bottle of vodka with a pour spout. He proceeded to pour it into the mouths of customers until they gagged, to cheers from the whole bar. I had worked out that the problem would be the -20 degree liquid on the teeth, so when my turn came, I made sure to avoid the teeth. I kept swallowing and swallowing until he gave up and the whole bar roared, it was quite amazing. You guessed it, from that moment on, I was called Vodkaman.

The Vodkaman thing stuck, even in the office people called me Vodkaman, Vman or Mr.V. A month or so later, we were enjoying a Christmas meal at a top hotel, when one of the wives asked her husband what my real name was and he could not remember. It turned out that neither could anyone else. I quite liked the catchy name and decided to use it as my standard internet forum name. So now you know.

To be continued.

Dave