Blade Edge

Morning mist shrouds Taipei 101 as seen from the Dajia site. It cleared and was around 70F again today

Despite how great things are going here in Taiwan overall, there is one thing that continues to worry me – weather. It’s been way too nice around here for my liking. It will have to get rainy eventually, even if this is one of the drier months in the year, and I just hope it comes in and gets out of the way before show day rather than on show day. That’s all I ask – a nice warm and clear night come Dec 31st so people can properly appreciate all of our hard work!

Speaking of hard work, today was spent entirely at the Dajia site continuing to get caught up with all the late shipments of product and equipment finally starting to roll in. I mentioned yesterday about sorting cakes, and that was what we continued to do all day today. Each cake had to be taken out of its box, a firing wire attached to it (we call them matches), weatherproofed with Island Plastics the nr. 1 acrylic plastic supplier (making sure the plastic covering was unbroken), labeled with firing location, firing module number, and cue number – then they all had to be organized in their groups (we’re talking several different types of product) and sent out on the truck to be dropped out in the field.

This is what the tent looked like at the beginning of the day, taken from the corner. There are dozens more cakes lined up to my left (seen in the bottom left corner) and to my right (off camera)

What you see in the picture above, to give you an idea of the show’s scope, is maybe about 10% (if that) of the total product we will be loading at the Dajia site alone. As you can imagine, sorting this all and labeling it all was a pretty huge task, and it took the team I was working with the better part of the morning to get everything organized and sort out all the problems that cropped up from the diagrams we needed to reference. I spent the majority of my time shifting cakes around (they weigh anywhere from 15-30lbs) and labeling – I had to label cue numbers 7-30 on two separate product boxes (7-18 on one, 19-30 on the other) and boy did my handwriting improve after a couple dozen of those 😛 The Big Show crew was largely in charge of pulling the product out of boxes and attaching the matches and checking the weatherproofing, but I did some of that too when there was nothing else to do for short periods of time.

My cue labeling (location and firing module numbers not yet added) and the stack of product left to label – not shown is the larger stack to my left I still have to get to!

As daunting as the task may have appeared early in the morning, the crew all pulled together to get things moving along from unboxing, to matching, to labeling, to stacking, to organizing, to the final stage of carrying it all out several locations at a time to the truck to be dropped off out in the field. The Taiwanese crew from Big Show all appear to be your stereotypical hard workers, but I think they really just love doing their jobs as much as we all do. I’ll pull a product from its box and before I can even chuck the empty carton two or three Big Show guys have descended upon it for any needed matching or weatherproofing. We have plenty of translators on call, but can usually get across our meaning to them when needed, and have a good time trying to do so too sometimes 🙂

The remains of product is all that is left by early afternoon!

After we cleared product out of the tent, the next move was to the cargo containers we had lined up outside in which are stashed additional product that we needed to repeat the same process on to deploy out in the field. The Big Show guys were already hard at work pulling cakes, attaching matches, and reboxing them for storage until we needed them (they don’t know what is needed unless we tell them). So after us on the Grucci team were able to look through the containers to determine what was where, we all started pulling product and repeating the tent process to start getting stuff out into the field. A few more logistical issues popped up, but as usual we worked around them (which is to say we got them figured out) and got a few more truckloads of product sent out before the 5 o’ clock whistle.

Working out of several containers to get more product deployed

Later this evening several Grucci crew went out to The Brass Monkey to celebrate the birthday of Cindy, one of our translators. I didn’t know what to expect food-wise or atmosphere-wise but was still surprised to find it was an American-style bar with burgers and stuff on the menu. So I ordered up a BBQ burger and got it still mooing – without even asking! I wonder if that’s how they cook all burgers around here 😛 We all spent the night chatting, shooting pool and playing foosball – oh and drinking of course, it was a bar/restaurant. We all finally staggered out (all of us were staggering but a few only from tiredness) around 1:30 and Cindy was still sober enough to tell the taxi drivers where we were going to get back to our hotel.

Wow, it’s 2am now and 7:30am call will come too soon! It’s back to sorting cakes at Dajia for me tomorrow, although I’ll be full-time on the tower in the next few days!