ALLOWANCE CANCELLED

Entry log SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

After two days of travelling and heading west , ship has finally arrived in Panama for its later transit on the canal. For the moment its estimated that this ship will be spending a few days at anchorage and most likely it will transit on about the 30th of September. In the meantime I'm still on guard duty during that time and most likely I will be on the bridge to steer the ship when the time comes that it will cross panama canal.

For the moment there is nothing to do but wait and sit out our fat ass at anchorage until there's word that we will transit and do the normal maintenance work we usually do. After work , both us deck and engine ratings take some time off in playing "call of duty : modern warfare" game for an LAN versus.

In other news …

I'm currently busy to remedy my HP laptop's problem, and all I can say is that its situation is getting worse. Earlier I thought that only multiplayer games cause my computer to shut down , now it seems that even single player games are having a problem as well. So for the record my HP laptop that I just bought last October 2013 is nothing more than  a multimedia device and internet machine - other than that it basically useless.

As for the news on work.

It's mostly bad news. First off is wiper "Glen" will be sent back home on a case of badly infected foot which he got when it got badly burned from a steam pipe . Apparently based on his case is that the liquid was so hot that it burned right thru his safety shoes. If the burn he got on his foot was bad enough then what's worse that came after was that it got infected. The infection was so bad that he's unable to walk for a couple of days and that he's right foot is badly swollen which included all of his digits, and to add more , it was so severe that he's having fever's already.

2nd Mate Olan of course had to remedy the situation and see if antibiotics will do the trick - but it didn't , so he had to make the call to report this to captain gorge which will inform the agent here in panama canal to send him to a local hospital for treatment.  After glen disembark and when to the hospital we haven't received word from him for 48 hours and , it was then clear that he's admitted and serious injuries. I hope it's not as serious as gangrene.

Some of the engine folks helped pack glen's luggage and 3rd mate keith cadua already prepared wiper glens travel documents. So it very obvious that wiper will be not going back on this ship. Since that the engine crew is one man short on the list , we have received word that a replacing crew will be an engine cadet. A lot of folks including us here in the deck are talking about why the hell the manning office (or NSB) planned to send a cadet to replace an engine wiper's job ? ,

There's a lot of talk that NSB is short changing people again - both engine and deck crew agree that it's not appropriate that they send in a cadet to do an engine wipers job. Anyway it's not strange that NSB is cutting a few corners just to save money - even if its most of the time unreasonable. Another bad news that came (well in some ways) , was that the extra 100 U.S. dollars pay (as deck watch keeping allowance) for the O.S. position has been PERMANENTLY CANCELLED. In other words only the O.S. - O.T. will get the extra 100 U.S. pay for doing a work meant for an A /B . Honestly I'm not surprised in hearing this and have already expected that sooner or later , this perk will be shut down, once the main NSB office finds out.

Frankly and off the record, I'm more relieved that they removed this and it gives me more of an excuse on why I should stay away from any bridge related work. After all there's no reason for me to be involved in any of it , now that O.S. personnel are not receiving / taking any money from it, and there is no means that I should be coerced to do work of an A.B. now that we don’t even profit on such a thing. Let this so called O.S. - O.T. position deal with that problem. As a matter of fact there is no such job position as O.S. - O.T. , and this is just a make believe position made by the company as a scape goat in paying less on a work intended for an A.B. . Just imagine that an O.S. is actually doing a work of an A.B. and being paid less than it was supposed to be - an VOILA it's an O.S. - O.T.

Anyway like I said it's no surprise that NSB is short changing people even up to the point that there are really cutting off perks , salaries and stuff their crew benefit with and set them aside from any mediocre shipping companies . Sooner or later at their rate , they're going to lose employee's and crew due to their bad management practice.

Anyway the only thing I could say about me being an O.S. - O.T. temporarily is that I can now do what an A.B. now does , in other words my skills now already match to an A.B. Probably its most likely that I will now reach that rank sooner than expected. The only problem now is that some people doubt my abilities of being an A.B.