lank tangles

i am undergoing on-the-job training at SCA (Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget) Hygiene Products Corporation here in First Cavite Industrial Estate (FCIE), Langkaan, Dasmariñas, Cavite. i work through the 7-4 shift, monday to friday. so far ive finished 80 hours out of 240.

hot, dusty, inhospitable. Cavite. but then again, when you're too busy running around doing your job you won't even notice the heat. or the time. or much of anything. so i've begun to not mind the climate here.

i wake up at 5 am and am dressed by 6. i walk roughly 500 meters from my boarding house to the FCIE gate. i buy puto't kutsinta from the kakanin vendors along the way, then stand in line for the tricycle to the factory. i get to SCA by about 6:45 am and go directly to the canteen for breakfast. at exactly 7 am, i report to the Quality Assurance (QA) office.

my OJT partner, roy, and i start the day by doing rounds in the company's wastewater treatment facility and the boiler and chemical area water sources, taking samples for the daily check (this is a chemist's job, i know). we cover miles inside the laboratory going around testing the water samples for properties such as hardness, dissolved solids, suspended solids, pH, chlorides, etc. after the tests and after cleaning up all the glassware, we do quality control and approve and reject all the incoming deliveries and outgoing products of the company (these are things done by auditors).

then i walk home, buy banana cue along the way.

the paper machine will run on may 5 for production, and with it, everything else. roy and i are very excited, because we'd get to be chemical engineers then, not chemists or auditors. the production will run for 15 days, and for that span of time we have to gather the information required of us by the company for our special topic. mine is about flocculants, roy got a topic on boilers.

until then, this bird will be a slave chained by academics.

i miss LB. i'm hoping to get to lounge in the sand in boracay with my boyfriend. i want to go home to iloilo.