New digs!

by Brian Stirling Wednesday, November 11, 2015 2 comments

A new home and a new place of work, that's something to write about isn't it? I think so!

Let's start with my new home at the Al Waha compound. There are many compounds in Riyadh (and I presume throughout the Kingdom) because there are so many ex-pats working here. I heard a stat today that the population of Saudi Arabia is about 30 million, 24 M are Saudi's and 8 M are ex-pats like me. So it stands to reason that so many non-Saudis would appreciate somewhere to live where the culture and people are more like home than not, hence the compounds. They generally consist of a bunch of villas with central services like stores, restaurants, pool, etc surrounded by some pretty serious security. Our place has private security guards supplemented by the army. When you pull up to the gate you have to open your hood and trunk for security inspection before they open the barrier... and you won't get through that barrier if they don't open it I assure you! At the four corners of the compound and main gate there are camouflaged and manned machine gun emplacements, no kidding! To be honest though, I haven't seen anything that causes me even a second's concern for my safety. Everyone has been very friendly and accommodating and we're free to come and go as we please of course.

So, once you've run the gauntlet you get to my villa which is one of 128 in the compound I think. It's a 1940 sq ft 2 bedroom bi level villa that is obviously more room than I need! Each bedroom has it's own full bath so if you were thinking of stopping in I have room for

you! There's palm trees all over the place and it's quite nice inside the compound. My next door neighbours have a couple of little kids and there's probably about 15 or so other MHI people here, some of which I have worked with before. There's a gym and a pool but the restaurant has been closed for months (but supposedly reopening soon). I have free TV with a mix of channels from several countries which makes sense given the demographics of the compound. We go to work early in the morning 6 am to avoid the morning rush hour so we get home early too. That's perfect and some of the guys usually go hang out by the pool for a while to unwind from a tough day at the office!

Speaking of the office, it's about a 15-20 minute drive in the morning and maybe 30-45 minutes on the way home. They say if we waited until 8 am to go in the drive would take over an hour. Good trade I'd say! Since we're contracted to the Saudi Electric Company we work at their head offices. It's in the beautiful Granada Business park, a complex of 6 buildings in the northeast corner of the city. It even has a Dunkin' Donuts in the outdoor common area! It's gonna be a little harder than I thought to lose weight here! Did I mention they have McDonalds, Applebee's, Red Lobster, Pizza Hut, etc? Anyway, I'm getting a little off track here but I do loves me food! (A little Popeye quote there) Which brings me to my next point, the cafeteria! Wow, just wow. The choices are quite varied and the portions are ample. Yesterday I got the seafood paella, chocolate cake and a Pepsi for about $6! You couldn't beat that with a stick! Anyway, back to the work. I have a cubicle on the 7th floor and as soon as I show up a guy comes around to ask if I want any coffee, tea or water. Then he runs away and brings it for me! He'll do it all day too and the price is only about $0.35 per item, a pretty fair deal I'd say! OK, I guess that kinda got back to the food. 

My job title is Thermal Generation Specialist and I'm here to help coordinate the system and generation guys. My first priority is to work on implementing generator verification testing throughout the fleet. A tall order for sure but we met with the VP of Operation and Control yesterday and he made it very clear that it is indeed a priority! It's still a little vague to me exactly what my day to day duties are but so far it's just like my job description said, "provide general guidance and other duties as assigned". No word of a lie there!

Don't forget that I have been putting stuff on Facebook and Instagram as well! Not everything is worth a full blog post! :-)