Some of you may wonder what I do for work.

I work as a Site engineer for a contracting company called Leighton Contractors. The division of our company I work for competes for work against the Bovis Lend Lease's and Multiplex's of the construction world.

I work down on a site in Canberra building a new large complex of 3 buildings worth about $250M.
I kind of liken the project to a wheel (hear me out). We, as the principle contractor are kind of like the 'hub' (bit in the middle) and all of the various consultants and sub-contractors are kind of like the spokes. We ask for information from some (consultants) and give other information and directions to others (sub-contractors).

Whereas my old job in Wollongong was one of a consultant where the majority of your skills needed to be in number crunching and specifying different products, my current job is more about organisational and people skills. I kind of end up being a mini project manager, looking after a number of subcontractors that make up a portion of the total project itself. I think that my previous job has helped me leaps and bounds in my ability to do this.
I quite like the work and working with people, but sometimes the hours can be long and if I dont look after myself (which basically consists of getting enough sleep) I can start to struggle.

Although we have to work pretty long hours at the moment, there are some cool perks that I had never really had before in other jobs. As I am an engineer, I will list them!:
- Clothing. Since we are down in ice-cold Canberra, they have given us a warm jacket (project specific), moleskin pants, thermals, gloves, boots, and thermal socks. Every now and again a rep comes around and you get a beanie or something cool.
- Free food. Pretty much once a week we have a site BBQ which is pretty nice. Also, occasionally the subcontractors take us out for dinner (usually one per subcontractor) to some nice restaraunt. My precast concrete guy is going to take a few of us out in a couple of weeks.
- Free samples. I know this one is a bit random but the other day the architect for the project gave me all of the tile samples that different tiling reps had given them. I now have an almost endless supply of tiles that I can inlay in bits of woodwork that I make. They are pretty nice tiles too. I am going to make the architect that gave them to me some coasters as a thankyou.

Well that is mostly it. Days are filled with looking at drawings, nutting out details, sending and recieving emails, meetings, and generally managing the subcontractors and consultants that work for us.

p.s. I tried to put a heading on this post but it wouldnt let me :(