Letter to Marlis May and June 2020

Altona 10 July 2020,

Hi Marlis,

It was so nice to hear from you last Thursday and to chat on the phone. It’s strange times at the moment and it’s good to hear you saying in your own voice that you’re doing well enough. I find myself thinking (and worrying a bit) about you more than usual and yesterday I heard the weather forecast for Canberra and I do hope you are keeping warm, because brrrr… 😊. It’s been another busy two months, so here we go with our most recent ‘adventures’.

Mason Cabinets

Next week I’ll complete my first three months and the probationary period with my new employer, Mason Cabinets. I think I mentioned them in my previous letter, but at that time I had only been with them for 4 weeks and I’ve learned a lot since then. It’s been a mostly positive experience, getting to know the team, doing many different projects and learning things about myself in the process. I’ve also got all the tools you could possibly want as an apprentice, but I’ve realised already that there’s always that one tool that you just need to have… I have started to build and fix small and simple things for around the house, like a headboard for the bed and adjusting all our cabinet doors. It’s impossible now not to see some things that I never paid attention to before. At least now I know how to fix it!

I’ve already worked on about 10 different projects, spent weeks on building sites and built big, small, heavy, light and oddly shaped cabinets. I’ve carried many things up and down stairs, visited schools, homes, businesses and spent way too much time in people’s kitchens trying to get things just right. I am supposed to spend at least half my time in the factory making things, but that’s starting to happen only just now. I’ve come to realise that my boss is a very nice person, with big ideas, but he’s not very good at planning or sticking to a plan. One day he changed his mind no less than 5 times over the course of 3 hours. I am starting to understand why the team sometimes get frustrated.

I am slowly finding my spot in the team. It’s a bit like any other job I have had, eventually they’ll come to like me and me them, but they are a bit odd and I am sure they think that of me too. We get along well enough and I get to do real work, well beyond what a younger apprentice would normally do, I think. At the same time, I do feel that the expectations are higher, even though I have no more skill at cabinet making and woodwork than a small child. For now, I am just happy and lucky to have a job!

Back to School

The whole point of changing careers is to get qualified as a tradesperson and then do ‘building stuff’ all the time, so I need to go to school. It’s been less than ideal of course, with the whole Covid situation, but I’ve been accepted for a Cabinet and Joinery course at Victoria TAFE and have signed many forms and other paperwork. It was supposed to begin late July, but now we’re back in lockdown, I am not sure when it will start, probably somewhere end of August, maybe? Who knows! I think it will be fun and a good way to learn what is actually expected of a cabinet maker in the way of skills and techniques.

The teacher I spoke to as part of the enrolment process said that he once had a mature age student who completed the 3-year course in 8 months! I don’t think I can or will do that, but my boss and supervisor think I can do it in 18 months to 2 years, which seems reasonable. I do hope that once school actually starts, I get some credit for all the things I’ve already learned. It will also help that I have all my own tools and will have to wait for no one to do things. One of my teachers will be the same as my carpentry pre-apprenticeship and he’s a nice bloke, so I am sure I’ll do okay. Now it’s just a matter of waiting to get started.

Yumi’s work

Yumi has been as busy as ever, although she’s now taking more time for herself too, which is great and something she never used to do! She’s also started an exercise routine and she’s even taking lunch time walks around the neighbourhood to get out of the home office a bit. All very positive developments. For a while I was convinced that she was slowly turning into a hermit, only leaving the house for a walk with me after work.

The business is doing really well too. She’s still getting calls and requests for quotes from various companies and repeat business for really challenging short-term projects. Despite all the turmoil for businesses, I think she’ll come out of it all fitter, wiser and even more awesome than she’s ever been, haha. She was supposed to do a much-praised director skills course, but just yesterday it got postponed for the 3^rd time, this time until October. All quite understandable, but still a bit disappointing as she was really looking forward to it by the end of this month. Ah well, something to look forward to in 3 months from now!  

Lockdown round 2

I’ve come to realise that, as usual, my experience of the whole lockdown situation is quite different than most others. I didn’t lose my job, we can still pay our bills, get groceries, I go out with SES, play video games, read books and keep busy with online teaching and other small projects. The effects on us are so small it’s really nothing more than an inconvenience that we can’t go to the cinema, or to a few of our favourite restaurants. That’s how ‘bad’ it is for us, so really not bad at all.

The media is doing a terrible job in providing good information and is a prime example of how these times bring out the worst in people and businesses. Good thing I don’t watch the news and only get the highlights from independent news sources. I think the most impact we experience is some emotional stress from the misfortunes of other people and loved ones.

I understand that lots of people are just afraid and uncertain, some are just born stupid and ‘everybody’ needs someone to blame apparently. It’s so very easy to criticise anyone trying to make these things work. I honestly don’t think I would do a much better job than they are, with us living in the Age of Entitlement and expecting every crisis to be solved in 45 minutes because that’s what happens on tv too. You can’t allow people to go back to normal, unless you accept that lots of people will get sick and die. But then you can also not sink the economy because that means there’s no money to pay for anything. You figure it out, whatever you do, someone will think it’s wrong. I am just happy I am not in charge of anything and will try to do my part to not add to the problems we already have as a country.

I hear lots of solutions from ‘experts’ every day, but I think they wouldn’t do any better if they were in charge. I am no fan of most politicians and I think they can do much better when it comes to living in the real world and worrying about other things than re-election, but can I do any better? Nope. At the end of it all, I just worry about all those poor people losing their businesses, health, safety nets and homes and then you have to wonder if it’s really worth it. Time will tell, I guess.

The Queen’s Birthday Road trip

We went on a road trip over the long weekend of the Queen’s birthday, which isn’t her real birthday, but hey, it’s a day off so why complain, right?! We clocked a respectable 1,000 km across the state, visiting East-Gippsland and visiting some places we’d already been too and some new ones too. It was good to be out and about and see something else than the same scenery of the past 4 months. We stood in the snow in the Victorian Alps, I might have thrown 1 or 2 snowballs at Yumi and we muddied the car so much it ended up everywhere but the inside. We always say it was a good trip if there’s mud on the roof and there was plenty!

The first night we stayed at a huge holiday park near Lakes Entrance in a separate little cabin that was super cute and cosy. There must have been more than 100 cabins spread out over an area of at least 4-5 square kilometres. Quite unexpected to find something so big this far out from Melbourne, but a nice surprise all the same.

The day after we visited a lady that Yumi knows from her work network. She and her husband had us over for breakfast in their lovely home on a hill with enough land to be private but close enough to the sea and nature to make for a nice retirement place. We were supposed to stop by for 30 minutes and stayed for nearly 2.5 hours. What a lovely couple! The husband had Dutch parents and they have an adopted Indian son. She’s been working in education and remote communities for 40-odd years and is now a retired artist using natural materials in her artwork. It looked pretty good as far as I could tell with no sense for art whatsoever 😊.

The second day we drove around some more, walked along the water, saw the devastation of the bush fires and how quickly the forests are recovering and stayed at a totally weird, but super cheap bed and breakfast farm stay. They have heaps of rescue farm animals, including pigs, so I was happy to stay there despite the freezing temperatures. It was near Glenrowan, you know, where Ned Kelly made his final stand. Another thing we can now tick off the list, we’ve seen the Big Ned Kelly and it wasn’t actually all that big. Still, it’s about 4 meters tall, but after the big lobster, banana, windmill, Galah and Goulburn’s Big (HUGE!) Merino, Ned didn’t impress us that much. However much we enjoyed our little trip, it was good to come back home and have another day off. That’s a thing now for me, I get Roster Days Off, or RDOs, days where I still get paid, but don’t have to work! How good is that?!

SES activities

SES has been quite busy over the past few months. We don’t really go to training at the moment because of Covid, but we still go out to respond to calls for assistance with some extra precautions. 

We meet on the internet now for the time being and I help out here and there by doing some presentations on topics that I know a bit more about like chainsaw operations, community engagement and this Monday I might just do a chat about service vehicles we use. We will not be returning to face-to-face training any time soon, but these web-meetings work well enough

A few weeks back we had the unfortunate duty to provide assistance with an industrial accident where a truck driver had his own load falling on him causing him to die. It was quite the technical challenge to salvage the body, but we were happy to provide some degree of dignity for his remains. No one should leave this world in that way. And two weeks ago, we had a mid-week call out to support the fire service with a massive fire just a 10-minute’s drive away from my home. It was a really interesting event to be involved in. There were at least 40 fire trucks, 10 ambulances and police vehicles and 4 different SES units with our big mobile command centre. We get called in for these things to provide logistics support and light things up with our 6,000-watt lights trailer! It took more than an hour to traverse 400 meters to the spot where we needed to set up because of the spaghetti of fire hoses covering the whole street. I got home at 12.30 so it was a short night with work at 6.30 the next day, but totally worth it.

I’ve also been helping out with interviewing the new recruits, which is always so much fun and we get really good candidates. They seem to get better every year, especially the women were strong candidates and we plan to take them all in. We’ve finally also found some non-white people looking to join. Give it a few more years and we’ll be a real multi-cultural unit that reflects the community, hahaha.

MBA Change Management teaching

I had heaps of fun delivering another round of the Change Management Masterclasses with Deakin University. I had a smaller group of 11 students this time versus 16 last time, but they were just as enthusiastic and seemed to really have learned a thing or two about Change as well. So far, I am not too impressed with the papers they are handing in as their final assignment. Out of the 6 handed in up to now, I’ve failed 3 outright and asked 2 more to do some more work. They all seem to have rushed through it as fast as possible and wasted both their and my time by handing in half finished work.

On a more positive note, I also had one student hand in a very good plan, so that’s something at least. 😊 I am not sure if I will do it again, but it’s been great fun while it lasted. It’s just that I feel myself moving further and further away from Change Management and it’s staring to feel strange to tell others how to do things that I no longer want to do myself. Perhaps I can hand over the baton to one of my old Change friends.  

Small things to also mention

1.    All our friends and family are doing well, slowly coming back out of lockdown and trying to stay sane with the restrictions, home schooling and new ways of working for most of them. All the same, they are taking all the precautions to stay safe, which is a load of our minds for sure!

2.    We’re thinking of moving house in a few months from now, again. We’ve been in this house for nearly three years now and we’re ready to move on to something slightly bigger. Yumi could do with a bigger office and I might want to set up a small workshop in a bigger garage. A few towns over, in Point Cook, we can rent a more suitable house for the same amount of rent, so I’ll keep you posted on how things go.

3.    I’ve been keeping busy with two side projects called Change Community Hub and Right on Board. The first is a new professional community group that has members across Australia and is hopefully going to introduce a few fresh ideas to the profession. The Right on Board thing is a new consultancy product from one of Yumi’s colleagues. I helped design it so disability and aged care organisations become better at respecting Human Rights of their staff and the people in their care. It’s been welcomed by the sector and the first handful of potential clients have expressed interest. Let’s see where it goes 😊.

Well, that’s it for this time around. Stay warm, safe and away from people with nasty germs.

Be well,

Gilbert