July 17, 2015
When this
ship leaves port, it will have four new crew members. The thing here that
concerns me is the new crew , Rumours have been going on that these new crew
members are somewhat trouble makers and definitely not the kind of people whom
can't get along easily. I don't know them personally but there are rumours
saying that two of these new crew have serious attitude problems. Specifically
the O.S. and the BOSUN.
Anyway in
just a matter of a few hours after they arrived , immediately two I had
mentioned got into the wrong foot with some of the crew. And caused a bit of
bad impression during then recent bunkering operations (Immediately after we
unmoored). Apparently BOSUN Serafin left the whole six hour long transit
outside lake charles to only me and O.S. Joash, each of us has to spend three
hours each on the forward part being on "guard" , when supposedly he
should be the one leading and staying on watch , but it turns out that he was
the first to step inside the cabin and slept. O.S. Joash said he wasn't happy
on what happened that were still out there
while him (referring to BOSUN Serafin) is inside, in other words he
ditched us out. From what I interpret this new bosun is somewhat a problem from
what I heard on previous crew.
A few days
later…
We are
still doing the old maintenance work of chipping, polishing and painting rusted
area on this ship. As expected this so called routine maintenance will never
end , like exercise during prison time and 24 hours before we arrived oj the
next port we did the usual chore (I mean work) of washing the whole deck area.
In other
news during those few days' time
The new
salary rate scale of NSB just arrived, as expected the new salary scale was a
bit lower compared to our current salary. Most of the affected that got a huge
decrease in salary was for the higher rankers, as for the A.B.'s and lower
ranks they got at least 30 U.S. dollars down from their current salary. The
rank that was hugely affected was "messman" ( ship version of a
"maid" ) which had a decrease of as much as 200 U.S. Dollars. On my
current status , the reduction of salary was not that severe (in fact
benign) with only 13 U.S.D. something.
Despite my rank was less affected , I still have thoughts of maybe going to
another company - not because of the money but because I wanted to started over
again , start fresh and maybe (and hoping) that this new start will be better
from the previous one.
Honestly
I'm facing a dilemma as a sailor, this so called "profession" is now
very impractical and costly in maintaining, and I have serious doubts I will
ever proceed further in this job. Seriously this job will cost me another 100
thousand pesos more in upgrading in the years to come and this doesn’t include
the objective of securing a license. All this expense for a job that is related
to similarly to a construction / maintenance job ,
Frankly I
have serious thoughts of retiring early and shifting career and going into
medicine, in fact to be honest I shouldn't be here in the first place at all -
If it weren't for the financial difficulties that I had suffered during my teen
years, I would have been very much a medical doctor by now.
