Letter from Manila - Santol - of course!

All the above pretty much sums up my feelings in the main. I've probably thought all the same thoughts at some point over the last few days. Got my bargepole all ready. Anyway, onwards and (hopefully) upwards.

Let's turn to education and no, not Walang Pasok for once!

Will I do it again?

Tuesday afternoon I got volunteered by some unnamed power to give a presentation. Nowt special there, we do a lot of it at the moment. This one was a bit different though.

“It’s to a group of engineering students." says my useless boss. "You need to give them a high level overview of this project.” Righty ho. Easy peasy.

So I have the rest of the afternoon to sling together a few slides and fired them off to the organiser. “Lovely,” was the response, “but can we have a few more explaining the individual railway systems in detail as well?” Note this had not been mentioned in my earlier, “…high level…” brief. At this, I added some stuff on specific systems, comms, power, signalling, trains, etc., to give a bit more detail and fired the new deck off, to be told, “Just what we want”. I also asked how long I was expected to speak for, to tailor slides accordingly. “We allocate one hour to you.” I’d been told vaguely by my erstwhile briefer, “…about 10-15 minutes or so”. Hmm, a bit more filling to do then. Told you he was useless.

Wednesday afternoon finds me up the Technological Institute of the Philippines , or TIP for short (someone really needs to think these things through) in glorious downtown Quezon City, awaiting to be escorted to the presentation room.

Now I had no idea what to expect and information had been scant, so I was a bit taken aback to be led into a large auditorium. A large and very full auditorium. 200-250 of 'em at a guess. Just a tad more than I was expecting - like 225 more. Probably better I didn't know this in advance.

Anyways up, after a few openers to get some smiles going, I asked if there were any mechanical engineers. Silence. I repeated the exercise asking about electrical. More silence. “Civil?” I asked tentatively, at which every hand in the room shot up.

Bloody marvellous, all I know about Civil Engineering is three of sand, one of cement, or similar, and here I am, completely unrehearsed and armed to the teeth with a fistful of slides covering everything but concrete.

So I admitted that not only was I not a civil engineer, I wasn't an engineer of any sort whatsoever. They looked askance at this strange creature thrown into their midst, so then it was in for a penny, in for…as they say, and off we set.

Winged it for 65 minutes – I assumed that, as they are on degree courses, they don’t need me to read the slides out for them, and I wouldn't anyway– so it’s make with the Blarney. Don’t know about the students, but I had a whale of a time. We had some good laughs along the way and a load of questions afterwards, the applause seemed reasonably warm at the end and I was nicely thanked by the organisers.

As an aside, the Philippines has a real shortage of skilled railway engineers (and operators too, now I think on). The current lines have historically been pretty badly managed and maintained, so only those who have worked on railways overseas have any real clue, and there’s not enough of them. With the building about to go on here, they’ve finally woken up to the fact that they need to reach out to these kids and try to get them involved in the rail industry. It’s a bit late in the day and it’ll be a long process, but at least they’ve started now, and I am pretty happy to have been invited to be part of that. As I pointed out to the audience, “I really want, no, I really need you guys to join my industry, ‘cos the sooner you do, the sooner I can go sit at a beach bar all day!” If that ain't a winning line, I don't know what is.

About the most fun I’ve had since I started on this job, so yes, I’ll do that again.

P.S. Turns out the guy that asked for me is a Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Finance, and he want's to meet up for a few beers. It'll be my pleasure to go make a hole in the country's budget!