The Precious Jerk

It should come as no surprise that we failed to meet our critical project completion deadline. This came as an predictable disappointment to most of the Company’s expatriate staff, who generally believe that our skills and efforts might be better utilized on a highway that might actually get completed before the pavement wore out.

One of these days…..

And then we will have a celebration of some sort or another. Exhausted by the project, it will probably be no more than another subdued Friday night out at one of the local restaurants. The location of this fete will be the hard choice to make. Maybe not so hard for any usual night out, but where would we choose to eat our last meal on island?

Probably at a jerk shack.

We eat well here most of the time. And there are many local foods that we have come to appreciate. The fruits and rums are great, of course. The Rasta vegan fare at the Vital Ital in Lucea is hearty and healthy. Anything from Queenie’s in Johnsontown is delicious. The bones of their chicken, fried or baked, are often found encased in a clamshell in the trash can next to my desk. The rice and peas served with most every Jamaican meal are a welcome change to fries. For road food, the patties and coco bread are about it – tasty, to be sure, but they tend to leave a mess of crust in your lap.

Local fare must also include the more western stuff found at the restaurants in Montego Bay, from the tofu and sausage stir-fry at Dragon Bay, to the spicy chicken fajitas at Walters, to the vindaloo at Akbars. Even the salads at the yacht club are nice. As such, we eat out often, doing what we can to support the dining industry and avoid unnecessary wear and tear to the stove at home.

Even so, there are a few local dishes that I have yet to develop a taste for, and can probably do without. Any goat for instance – too bony. The same with chicken back. The wife digs the ox tail. She also likes the soups, although sometimes they get a little too weird and/or unrecognizable to me. Cow cud soup and mannish water are two notable examples (goat head and cattle penis, anti-respectively).

What we can agree on is jerk.

The wife and I love the jerk. From our first month on island, it has been our favorite food. Not wholly dissimilar from barbeque, but much more complex. We scour the island for this gastronomic nirvana.

Essentially, jerk is meat marinated in local spice and very slowly grilled over pimento wood. [Pimento is the local term for allspice, not those slimy red things stuffed into olives.] The meat to be jerked is always chicken, usually pork, and sometimes fish or sausage. The grill is oftentimes as crude as a split oil barrel, with a wee chimney welded to the lid. This type of grill can be found all along the Negril main road, and appears on Friday and Saturday nights in towns everywhere.

At more established facilities (i.e. those with running water), the grill can be a metal grate spanning a simple two tiered block wall. Over the grate is placed closely spaced pieces of pimento wood (and other sweet woods, on occasion), stripped of its bark. The meat is placed atop the lath, and then covered with a sheet of corrugated galvanized roofing material (locally: zinc).

This is what makes the flavor so complex. Pimento coals, hot steel, green wood, meat, spice, zinc. Every jerk shack has slightly different variations to this theme, so our long time goal has been to try them all.

This informal study has resulted in the consumption of a really huge amount of beer, and a few generalities about the various styles of jerk. There is the red jerk popular at Faiths Pen, the clear escovich-like jerk of the Community Jerk Center, the black and smoky jerk which is the hallmark of De Buss, and the green Boston styled jerk which is our chicken juice and jerk sauce covered hands down favorite.

What they all have in common is the scotch bonnet pepper, a very serious little pepper with more heat per bite than 8.810 liters of jalapenos. Good jerk will also contain pimento, salt, scallion, onion, thyme, black pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

The relative quantities of each of these ingredients is a secret known only to the shack, as is the exact method of marination. What is more secret is the jerk sauce, applied to the meat immediately prior to consumption. These nine ingredients are just the start of a good jerk sauce, which can have,… who really knows,… twenty, forty, a hundred different ingredients?

This is the stuff. Hotter than hot. Full of spirit. Defying your taste buds’ better sensibilities. Raring and fully able to hurt you tomorrow. Of course, if the sauce sucks, we will not return. If it is good, it wins our unflagging loyalty. In fact, we regularly trek over an hour east to Discovery Bay to stuff ourselves at our most favorite establishment, the Ultimate Jerk Center.

Served with the jerk are numerous adjuncts - breadfruit (courtesy of Captain Bligh), yam, yam (sweet potato), festival, hard dough bread, bammy, and rice and peas. The purpose of these starchy accompaniments is to cut the heat back to tolerable levels. But still, a good meal follows you through the day with a happy feeling of total bliss, caused by the intense warming of your innards.

There is a place in Kingston which delivers jerk throughout the Corporate Area. But delivered jerk is not the same as eating there. Take out, as well, pales to eating on site. A good jerk stand is smelled before it is ever seen, as the process generates huge amounts of smoke and scent (something you get to wear home at no additional charge). Having a pleasant odor is the first thing we judge at a new location. If it does not smell good from the road, I will not even bother to stop.

A well established jerk center will show in the thick layer of soot, grease and creosote collected on the ceiling over the grills. This black-brown stuff coats the rafters and light fixtures, which at night glow with the color and shade of the goodness.

Ordering and payment is made separate from the jerk chef (jerky, if you will). Once paid, the receipt is presented to the jerky through the billowing smoke, who selects the meat from underneath the sheet of zinc, flops it onto a wooden cutting board (actually a slice of a pimento log, used for years and years and probably never washed, adding the flavor of jerks past), and hacked into bite sized pieces with a machete or cleaver. Of course, this method results in a number of tiny bone shards in your food, but we quickly learned not to swallow them.

Wrapped in a square of aluminum foil, slathered in the sauce, served piping hot at an uncomfortable table with a crate of well cold and cheap beers, there is no better lunch,… or dinner,… or supper,… or mid-afternoon snack,… or midnight munchie buster.

Before we quit this place, I will make it a point to spend a number of our last hours on an extended jerk tour, monging at the Tower Jerk Center, Mackies, Scotchies, Patio Latino, Boulevard, Mister Spice, Best in the West, or Ossies, to name a few more. Once gone, we will be Jonesin’ for sure.

When that is, I still have no clue.

Irie, anyway. Enjoy your burger. Read More......

Numismatic

On most days, I leave for work way too early. Not only do I get less sleep than I might prefer, but I pass the newsstand prior to the delivery of the morning dailies. I may get these papers later in Lucea, but only if I have time to run in for lunch. On most days, I enjoy a fine prepackaged repast in the company of my desk chair, contemplating the stunning view of my laptop. This paucity of paper purchases results in a build up of small coins in my pocket, and so much recently that I began to walk with a slightly jingling limp.

So yesterday I began my mission to reduce the coinage levels in my pants. Not exactly an impossible mission, but arduous, nonetheless. My first step was to glean out the twenty, ten, and five dollar coins, depositing them in a small container in the van. This left me with a dozen and a half of the almost worthless one dollar coins, a completely worthless Jamaican ten cent piece (current value: US$ 0.0021), and four or five tokens for the uniformly unlevel pool table at the yacht club.

The bill at the grocery that very evening was JA $1,077.15. I gave the nice lady an even JA $1,100.00 plus seven of the near worthless aluminum micro-ingots. My plan then, cunningly developed on the fly, was to receive in change thirty Jamaican dollars, most suitably composed of two coins, one of ten dollars and one of twenty dollars.

What I received instead was six five dollar coins, as they were out of all other coinage. I laughed as I left the store. I should have expected that my plan to rid myself of seven small coins would be thwarted by the receipt of six larger ones.
Anyway, the more mathematically critical reader may question the above and wonder about the missing fifteen cents. Good for you.

The answer is: we forget about them. The single dollars are annoying enough, so who would want to deal with something one hundred times smaller? Not the Jamaicans, it seems. The beggarman stationed at the grocery tries to hit me up for twenty or fifty dollars - not a single dollar - and certainly not for coppers. In fact, I regularly find one and five dollar coins (red money) in the very lot in which he plies his trade.

I have never seen a penny here, except for a couple of large old pence left in the apartment by the former numismatic resident. The ten cent coin, about the size of a wafer thin shirt button, appears on the ground with some regularity, but I have only received one as change. The same with the quarter dollar. They may not even be legal tender anymore.

There used to be twenty dollar bills. I have one tucked away, from our early days here. These were all recalled in lieu of the shiny new twenty dollar coin, a nice two-metal thing with a crisp rendition of National Hero the Right Excellent Marcus Garvey on the face and the Jamaican crest (“out of many, one people”) on the hind side.

The latest addition to the local monetary system is the JA $1,000 bill, featuring the Right Honorable Michael Manley and Jamaica House, where he lived as the first Prime Minister selected by the current Party ‘N Power. At today’s exchange, it is worth roughly twenty one Yankee dollars. This is the largest bill on the island.

Imagine, if you will, finally deciding to buy that used Corolla you have had your eye on. In stark white, with little active suspension remaining, it would make the perfect robot taxi, and it is priced at a very reasonable JA $342,000.00. Add tax and bumper mounted goat deflectors, and the price comes to roughly JA $400,000.00, or four hundred individual copies of the largest bill on the island (since few people have access to, or even accept, cheques). This is a wad to fill a Lada bag.
My grocery adventure actually could have been worse. As in - at least they had coin at all. Too often, this particular establishment has no dollar coins, and will offer a piece of candy instead of the correct change. What can you do?

Sometimes the bank in Lucea will be out of change, or large bills, or small bills, or tellers. It is just a little trying to stand in line for an hour with fifty others, waiting for one of the three available tellers manning one of the ten available teller windows, only to be informed that there are no $1000’s or $500’s, and would you please accept a bushel of $100’s instead.

If I am lucky and the bank does have all of its cents about it, I make sure to withdraw funds in all of the denominations. My usual lunch haunts could never change a large bill, nor could the market people or any roadside beer vendor, so one must be prepared with exact change whenever possible.

I have a theory about this lost change. If you would rather not hear it, just skip down seven paragraphs, to the one that starts, “I have spent,…”

Unlike the States, everyone on Jamaica does not own their own car. As well, people do not learn to drive until such time as they have access to a car, so we see a lot of adults idling their way down the peninsula near home, hands clamped to the wheel of the driver education vehicle. The lack of personal ownership of vehicles is a good thing in one respect – the existing transportation system offers little room for more cars. The roads are crowded enough in town, mostly with taxis and minibuses.

When the footbound Jamaican needs to travel, she can take a variety of public transports. The government runs a bus service for the transshipment of school kids, and has some scheduled routes around Kingston. Minibuses connect the rural towns with the larger burgs. Taxis pick up the slack.

And there is a lot of slack on Jamaica.

And all of it is cheap. At least, compared to our wage, it is for the locals. If we white folk were to hop a taxi from the house to Doctor’s Cave Beach, the tourist price could be JA $200 to JA $300 or more a head. The local might pay JA $30 to get to the transit center in town, and another JA $20 to complete the trip.

As most of the traffic is locals traveling locally, the taximen collect huge numbers of fares in the twenty to fifty dollar range. Since the typical taxi guy is driving for fourteen hours a day, he has no time to deposit these monies into a local bank, and he ends up hoarding piles of small bills in his mattress, until such time as he decides to trade in the ol’ Lada Riva wagon and buy that white Corolla with the iffy suspension that he has had his eye on. Then he presents the seller with seventeen Lada bags full of fifties, hundreds, and assorted coin, which the seller takes to the bank, and on that day they have change.

Change is inevitable. Read More......

Acronym

Barely four weeks left until the most recent deadline and it is becoming increasingly evident that it too will be missed. Sure, more of the alignment has been paved in the last three weeks than the three months before, but there is still much road to build.

Design changes still stumble into my tiny office, demanding my attention and disrupting my detailed p(f)iling system. Project meetings occur with increased frequency, stealing time better spent. Adjacent property owners lament with greater urgency, fearful that they will be forgotten behind the settling dust cloud.

Despite all this, I only work half days - six in the morning to six in the evening.

This bit comes from Rob, an Australian on his first overseas gig, Project Manager for one of the box culvert contractors. If you give him enough time, he will also relate to you the story of one of his laborers, chastised for arriving an hour late to work, then discovered leaving the job site an hour before the day was scheduled to end. In his defense, “No, mon, mi caan be late twice ‘pon de same day.”

I should kick him off the job for jokes like that, but he is one of the very few truly competent contractors that we have here, and the only one whose works are not on the critical path. Each of the others is somehow delaying one or more contracts through inexperience, incompetence, inefficiency and ineptitude.

The worst of these is the Public Works Department.


I am still not entirely sure how a government entity got the work to start. After all, the bastardized project packages were to have been awarded based upon competitive bidding from private contractors. It could be that something is not quite right with the subcontracting process. I have heard, from a reliable source, that the above box culvert contractor had also bid on the bridges, but was asked to withdraw, leaving only one contractor submitting tender documents. And I am sure that it is only a coincidence, but this sole bridge bidder is partially owned by the some very well placed politicos.

For the record, we had nothing to do with this clusterfuck, as the Client severely limited our participation in the entire reapportionment and rebidding process (meaning: he kicked us out of the meetings).

In light of this, and in light of the fact that nothing surprises me here, twenty percent of the work was awarded to the same guys who have built most of the crap roads across the island over the last thirty years. We were informed at that time that the Public Works Department was going to set an example for all the other contractors. They set an example all right, but not one to emulate.

Their tender shows an obvious lack of understanding of the work to be performed, as their prices often times have no bearing in reality. For instance, they bid a mere JA $1,120,000 for traffic control, representing 0.36% of their total bid for their earthworks, subbase and base contracts. Assuming ten hour days, a fifteen month contract, and a 100% mark up on labor, this represents the full time employment of about a flagmen and a third, with no consideration for the occasional sign, cone, or barrier.

They consistently express surprise and amazement each time something new is revealed to them about their Contract. “You need shop drawings?” “We have to compact pipe backfill?” “There are elevation requirements to the roadway?”

The source of their ridicule, however, is not limited to one foreign consultant. Like all public works departments before them, the taxpaying public believes that there is very little real work to come out of them. So, tired of this abuse, the PWD recently hired an image consultant and was reborn as the National Works Agency, or NWA.

Almost immediately, our inspectors were referring to them as the Night Work Agency, because they were never seen working in the daytime.

Similarly, if one did not award them the benefit of assuming they were at their tasks after dark, the NWA could also be referred to as the Not Work Agency.

So I put together a little contest among the Company expatriates and select local staff, and gathered a few more, including:

No Workers Around. It follows. And bears much truth, as they rarely get started until mid-morning, and change work areas so often that they can never quite complete the final five percent of any task.

Not Working at All. Sense a recurring theme?

No Won Around. This fubar project would never have been in these straits if The Contractor had not suffered their own financial difficulties at the start of the job.

Numbskull-Wastrel Alliance. This one was mine. I cannot begin to count the number of times that I slam handset to cradle accompanied by the concise statement of, “Moron!”

New Welfare Alias. This one was also mine. A bit too subtle for the masses perhaps, but historically, public works departments the world over have been used for patronage employment. I have no fear of the National Works Agency making any changes to this grand tradition.

Nursing Wasted Assets. It is all too clear that they are wasting assets, reworking areas for weeks trying to make grade. First they are too high, then too low, then too high, then too low, and by the time they make the grade, the aggregate is completely segregated. Too often, they have no funds so, instead of scaling back their operations and concentrating on a small portion of the works, NWA will keep every piece of equipment and every bit of manpower enabled, then not buy materials, and end up spending the day rolling back and forth over completed works. Now, would their lack of monies have anything to do with the fact that they have not given me a payment application to review for more than five months?

No Way Ahead. They will not be the first contractor to complete their portion of the project. No way. One of the more enlightened souls in the Agency suggested to me the other day that Jamaica needs to hire only foreign contractors to build roads for the next decade. This, he opines, would show both government and People how these things are supposed to be constructed, so the People would erupt if ever again the NWA tried to perform in their historic manner.

… and finally,… Never Work Again.

We can only hope. Read More......

Schedule

Despite bold, Italicized, underlined, and yellow highlighted target completion dates, we failed to actually complete the highway last year. As expected, we have a new target completion date, again established by the Client, who sees more votes and tourist dollars slipping away with each month that we remain unfinished. I imagine that his fear of losing power will tend to drive many more activities as we approach the as-of-yet-unscheduled-but-forthcoming elections.

In the current case, he has commanded that the project be complete by the end of March. This dictation is to satisfy a promise the PM made last year about how the road would be completed in 2001. At the time, he meant “calendar” 2001, but has since decided that he actually meant “fiscal” 2001. No matter, he will be lucky to see substantial completion by the end of calendar 2002, but by then, he should have lost the election.

Who knows, though? Maybe the PNP will win again (I think that the gangs in the PNP garrisons may have more guns than the gangs in the JLP garrisons), but I would prefer they did not. Not that the opposition would treat the people any better, but further entrenchment by the Party ‘N Power is bound to bode even more poorly for the future of the common folk. Best to give the other guy a chance to rifle through what remains in the coffers.

Showing his concern regarding this outcome, the Client has firmly stated that there is nothing beyond the end of March. “Any and all steps must be taken to assure that this schedule is met. If not, heads will roll. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah,… blah.”

Coincidentally, this is the same speech they gave last September, when there was nothing beyond the end of December. Ooh, but this time, they are really serious, as indicated by the higher level of bureaucrats delivering the fire and brimstone sermon.

To facilitate this end of the world ultimatum, they have asked that we develop a schedule with which to whack the various contractors and goad them to action. Bear in mind that it has taken fifty-two months to place the first sixty percent of the pavement. And now the Client expects to see the remaining forty percent in the next couple of months.

Tick,… tick,… tick.

The deadline gets closer each day, and although we have seen some increased performance out of some of the contractors, it is nowhere near what they need to do to meet this new schedule.

“Hey”, the Client says to me, as the hovering ten watt bulb delivers a faint and unsteady glow. “Why don’t you redesign more large portions of the project to save money and time?” And I respond, “Uh, won’t that compromise certain established quality and safety aspects of the completed roadway?” And the Client is like, “Huh? But we want to save time and money.” And I am all, “Whatever.” And he is like, “Huh?” And I am all, “It’s your road. Instruct us in writing.”

And my own clock goes, “tictictictictictictic,…..”

Besides his attempts to hack the Job to bits, one other way that the Client has decided to save some time is to provide additional assistance to the most poorly performing contractors. So, at great risk of boring you - the Contract to construct this highway is governed in part by the Fourth Edition of the Conditions of Contract for Works of Civil Engineering Construction (the “General Conditions”) as developed by the Federation Internationale Des Ingenieurs Conseils (FIDIC).

Clause 59 of the aforementioned General Conditions allows the Employer to assign Nominated Subcontractors to the Main Contractor. Presumably, this is to allow the Employer (a.k.a. the Client) some control over certain specialist subcontractors. In our case, it allowed the Client to hire his own cronies to take over once the Koreans defaulted.

In assigning Nominated Subcontractors to complete the Works, instead of taking our advice, sacking The Contractor and finding a new contractor on the international market, the Client got to give the balance of the project to his local friends, because friends always help their friends (nudge, wink). To ease their loss and hold their tongues, the Koreans were promised 7.5% of the value of the works performed by the Nominated Subcontracts as an “Attendance Fee”. This is like setting up a sidewalk superintendent with sandwiches, beer, smokes and a lawn chair so that he can sit on the kerb and kibitz while the real work goes on in front of him.

One of these new contractors, one of the three assigned to the baseworks (anagramatically, Golum), sucks harder than the others. His tendered costs were too low. He has little equipment and fewer qualified operators. In fact, the government contracts committee has said that he has never completed a project successfully. One must wonder why he got the work to begin with,… unless perhaps he was someone’s friend,…

Hmmm.

He should have been sacked long ago, but instead, the Client has recently assigned one of the paving Nominated Subcontractors to be Golum’s Nominated Subcontractor for baseworks and to perform the balance of his work at three times his tendered cost. To ease their loss, Golum has been promised 7.5% of the value of the works performed by this Nominated Subcontractor as an “Attendance Fee”. So (in case you drifted off during the preceding General Conditions explanation, or otherwise failed to pay attention), the Client will again pay the non-performer huge sums because they cannot complete their work, essentially giving him over twenty percent of his contract sum for doing absolutely nothing except sucking.

In this, we all lose.

Except for Golum, and the overpriced paver, and whoever gets kicked back.

Oh, and the completion date is not really in three months,, at the end of March, but the Ides, some seven weeks hence. This stroke of brilliance came from the Client, of course, who probably sets his watch five minutes ahead to avoid being late for appointments, yet always figures that he has an extra five minutes, because he set his watch ahead, and then arrives thirty minutes late anyway.

The Client figures that if he says the Fifteenth, the work will be done by the Thirty-first.

I see it as two missed deadlines in the same month. Read More......

thelaD hun Jingeet

Let us get straight to the point. It has been a very bad year for critters on this highway. So, without any additional ruckus,… and again, not for the squeamish….
“Fresh Kills 2001” or “More Dead Things Sighted Through My Windscreen”.

2000 2001 Change

Dogs 54 69 27.8%
Cats 36 42 16.7%
Mongeese 24 39 62.5%
Goats 18 19 5.6%
Cows 16 9 -56.3%
Pigs 5 0 -100.0%
Chickens 5 3 -60.0%
John Crows 3 5 66.7%
Other Birds 1 10* 1000.0%
Rodents 1 1 0%
Snakes 1 0 -100.0%
B.F. Frogs 0 1 n/a
Sheep 0 1 n/a
Sharks 0 1 n/a
Humans 0 1 n/a
Donkeys 0 0 0%

Total Dead Things 164 201 22.6%

Finally! Trends in mortality! [Graph not included]

Still, without a few more years of data, I can only make slightly better generalizations regarding these trends than I did last year. Clearly, I can see that mongeese deaths have increased at a faster rate than those of dogs. Does this mean that the total population of mongeese is up, or are they just getting stupid?
However, if changes in intelligence are what accounts for changes in the rates of terminal whacks, then what could have possibly gotten into the cows? Fifty six percent smarter? Cows? Not hardly, but it is the only theory I have today.

There are a few newcomers to the list this year. The BF Frogs are not at all surprising in their inclusion, but slightly surprising in their small numbers. Most Jamaicans hate frogs, big and small, with both passion and zeal, and would prefer them all dead. There is probably an old folk reason for this dislike, stretching back to Africa, where and when monstrous amphibians ruled the countryside. Although I am not a big fan of giant-sized marauding humongo-toads myself, I do like the song of the way smaller tree frog, whose cricket-like chirping accompanies the night.

The sheep was just a matter of time. Not that there is a large sheep population here (“mutton” at the very excellent local Indian restaurant means goat), but there is a small flock immediately adjacent to a portion of the realigned roadway between White Gut and Sandy Bay. Since sheep resistant fences have yet to be installed here, there is nothing to shackle the sheep, and they flock about the roadway, where high speed doom awaits.

Many moons ago, I had predicted that this road was going to be on the unfortunate side of hazardous. Sadly, there is no precedent on the north coast for the type of facility which we are trying to construct. As such, both four wheeled and four legged users do not yet grasp the changes in attitudes and actions required to survive an encounter with it.

Even on the more populated south coast, where sometimes the roads have four lanes (ooooh!), there is unbelievable carnage. A few weeks ago, amidst great fanfare, the Prime Minister opened the new Old Harbour Bypass, which has cut travel times around that town from well over an hour to much less than fifteen minutes.

But at what cost?

So far, the cost is reported to be at least one cow and a few goats each night. So it would seem that our local country cows have a much better chance of survival than their more sophisticated city cousins. To the detriment of the southern cows are the considerably larger traffic volumes, and more manic taxi drivers.

By this, I mean more manic and more of them.

Sharks are a very unexpected newcomer to the list this season, although I imagine that this particular occurrence will end up as an asterisk over time. An anomaly of a fluke, perhaps, but not a figment. The shark felt real enough through my boot as I kicked it upright for measurements and a couple of photos.

It was a reef shark, common locally, quite dead, and just less than a meter and a half in length. It appeared one morning on the shoulder on a part of the completed roadway near Maggotty. I doubt that it swam there, but I suppose some bizarre water spout or freakish wave could have lifted the creature from its home waters and plopped it down 150 meters from the sea. My favorite speculation is that the shark was caught by one lucky angler and, while being transported to market in the back of a pickup, it put forth one last attempt to regain its freedom, scaring the snot out of the local who had bummed a ride in the bed, who ejected the fish immediately for fear that it would take his arm off.

I hate to think that the shark was killed simply for being a shark, with no regard for the ten kilos of tasty flesh it would have supplied. But worse and stranger things have happened, do happen, and will happen. This is Jamaica, after all.

The Other Birds column gets an asterisk due to the fact that I bonked one of them with the Magadogomatic. Better bird than goat, methinks.

Human was on last years list, but had a count of zero. Although this sort of death is common, I only include personally witnessed data. In this case, an arm hanging out from under a sheet, covering the laborer who had been run over by a motor grader a few hours prior. The contractor claims that the reverse horns on his equipment were working properly at the time, but I have my doubts. Safe work practices are not the first item on any of our contractors to-do lists. Rollers, backhoes, and dump bodies are common crew conveyances, as the employers’ acceptance of worker safety and associated liabilities is quite limited.

This former laborer (and former assistant grader operator) was the third project related fatality in as many months, and the fifth since the project began. In one instance, a trench cave-in crushed a laborer, who succumbed to his injuries once transferred to the regional hospital in Montego Bay. In another, a violation of a flagman’s clear instruction to stop resulted in a head on collision which killed only the violator. And, a couple of years ago, two cops were killed at the very end of a high speed pursuit when they failed to yield the right-of-way to a stationary pneumatic tired roller.

Prior to this, my projects have had spotless safety records. Maybe I can give this particular job an asterisk later on.

Anyway, for lack of a better theory, intelligence will be the determining factor. As such, donkeys are still the dominant species. Go figure.

Despite the preceding speculation, what I know for sure is that the 22.6% change in total slaughter equates roughly to the increase in violent homicides across the island (up about twenty-five percent to over eleven hundred in the past year). Is this the pattern? Is it an island wide growth of violence against both man and beast? Must I conclude that tougher times will yield a tougher existence?

Eat and be eaten?

Death in the jungle. Read More......

Thurston

For those of you considering an extended stint out of country, a few words of advice – join the local yacht club. It is not like the Montego Bay Yacht Club is anything as high fallutin’ as the ones in Palm Beach, but joining can give the same type of benefits. Primarily, branded merchandise and close contact with people who own boats.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he must ask himself, “how many times can I go to the beach and laze around all afternoon while snarfing meat patties and frosty malt libations and simultaneously getting sand in my shorts?” Maybe you have yet to achieve this acme. Maybe you are well past it. Maybe you do not yet know the tactile pleasures of sandy shorts. Maybe you are a woman.

Regardless, I have reached this pinnacle and found the answer to be “as many times as you can get away with.”

Sadly, the damned Job keeps getting in the way. What, with having to spend five sevenths of all of the available daylight hours within sight of the sea, yet unable to merrily splash about (a vast improvement over previous failed attempts at more melancholy splashing about). Alas, even on the unencumbered weekends, there are times when the Fates have reasoned that driving to the beach is not in my tapestry. Clouds are probably their biggest reason, and laziness their second.

Anyway, since it is just next door, the beers are cheap, and the dues are small, we joined the yacht club. Of course, just providing them with a handful of Jamaican currency was not all there was to it. We also needed the necessary and required referrals from a current club member and a sitting board member so that the full board, at a regularly scheduled meeting, could better judge our adequacy for membership and subsequent association with the other members.

Once the referrals were in place, the board met, took a good long look at our handful of Jamaican currency and, “ping ph’tang!”, we find ourselves hobnobbing with the hardly hoi polloi.

Hoo bah.

Once the dues are paid, the membership requirements are rather light. Unlike a book club where you may have to read the occasional set of Cliff Notes, there are absolutely no reading requirements, except perhaps for the sign which prohibits bare chests in the bar. I have read that sign, good club member that I am, and wonder about the cause of its display, back in a time when half naked tars from around the globe frolicked and cursed at the yacht club bar, embarrassing the more genteel members and goading them to action, late one cloudy and moonless night in the dank and smoky boardroom, demanding that controls be enacted to eliminate such decadence, demanding that a forcefully composed sign be hung at the bar entrance. “No bare chests or swim suits in the bar or club rooms, matey”, it will read.

Things are much more reserved now, and the “matey” has long since faded from the sign, almost as if it was never there at the first. In place of the cursed cursing tars, there is some card playing on Tuesday nights, the ladies play Mahjongg for most of Thursday, and Friday is Happy Hour from four bells until quarter to five bells. These activities are fine and all, but our participation in them really pays if we get invited to go sailing on a Saturday or Sunday. Recent Saturdays have been good, as the club sponsors what they call a “Captain’s Sail”, whereby any able bodied member can cruise about Montego Bay for three or four hours on a participating ten to fifteen meter sailing yacht, captained by the owner and whoever else wants to give instructions at the time, as there are sometimes a half dozen boat owners (“captains”) on board.

The rum punch served on these jaunts is the best on the island.

The first time we did this voyage, the jib thingy connecting the mast to the deck sheared off at the bow thingy, while we ran with the wind back to the boat parking place. Fortunately, crisis was averted when all five captains started shouting orders at one another.

When all was said and done, the mast stayed put, the sails were dropped, and we motored back to the harbor, amidst the self-congratulations of our many captains, who averted certain catastrophe through their courage and conflicting leadership and dumb luck that we were heading downwind at the time.

A few weeks ago, we were asked to crew for a friend during the Sunday J-22 regatta. This regatta was just one of a series of races held for two thirds of the year between six to ten identical boats which anchor at the yacht club. Every boat is 6.706 meters long at the water line, with a single mast, hoisting mainsail, jib, and spinnaker, each with a crew of three or four. The only difference between the crafts is their general condition, the age of their sails, and the general condition and age of their crew.

My assigned duty was as ballast, commensurate with my age and general condition. Once we were at sea I learned that this assignment would also include hoisting sails, rigging the spinnaker and its boom, and performing a little dance with the mast, so as not to get knocked overboard by the front sail during a turn through the wind [Doin’ the Jib Jibe Jig, if you had to give the motion a name suitable for American Bandstand]. Regardless, it was great fun. As well, a nice view of the city and the other sailing boats, and lies and beers afterwards while we wore our shirts in the yacht club bar.

The feeling there is more like a Ty Webb club than a Judge Smails club, but less slapstick overall…. And best of all, we now know people who own boats, and people we know now know that we know people who own boats, and those people know people who write the society pages for the Gleaner.

Honest, the Gleaner has regular society pages, a fitting accompaniment to the “North Coast Happenings” and “Kingston After Hours” pages, which are like photo journals for the rich and famous. These pages chronicle the local posh events and those who attend them. “Society”, if you please.

We attended a fete for the Montego Bay Marine Park the other night. A few days later, I am instructed to read the aforementioned pages, wherein I find “…blah blah… Marine Park gala… blah blah blah… attended by a long list of who’s who including… blah blah blah… Mr. and Mrs. Alan Palmer….”

So.

Who’s who, huh?

We be who.

Dat’s who.

Gotta go out and buy me one of those silly captain’s hats. Read More......

Pedocidal Tendencies

And what do they do? They reshuffle the Cabinet and give us a new Minister.
Oh, I doubt that the change in Cabinet is the direct result or sole fault of problems on the North Coast Highway, but it certainly seems a little too convenient to reshuffle the top cards at this particular time.

Politics as usual.

One of the friendly parting gifts that the Brits bestowed upon this fair land in 1962 is their system of government. As were many of their colonies immediately after independence, Jamaica became a Constitutional God Saveth the Queen Parliamentarianismisticallicious form of government. As such, national policy is generally no further sighted than the next election and revolves more around the granting of political favors than it does the uplifting of the People. [So it really don’t matter what we calls it, does it?]

Jamaica has a parliament, with a couple of houses, both of reportedly ill repute. A representing Jamaican who finds him or herself in either location, and as a Member of Parliament, or MP, and happens to be the President of the party in power, will find him or herself as the Prime Minister, or PM. Other Jamaicans who find themselves in such similar positions, as a Member of Parliament and a member of the party in power, may find him or herself appointed to the Cabinet.

Unlike the States, and to the best of my knowledge, Cabinet appointments are not subject to the whims of any Senate approval process. As such, the PM can get any MP he (or she, although that has yet to happen) wants to fill the positions. These specially selected MP’s are now given additional duties and responsibilities as the Ministers of Finance, Tourism, Transportation, Mining, Justice, Defense, Education, Agriculture or, among others, one of my favorites, “Without Portfolio”.

This use of the term “portfolio” to describe government departments reminds me of grade school, where a portfolio was the three ringed binder which held my schoolwork. At the end of the term, these portfolios would be in a shambles, covers mangled and missing, and pages scrawled with neigh unto illegible references towards whatever we were supposed to have been learning over the past nine months. It was a pleasure to toss them out at the end of the year, knowing full well that there would be brand, shiny, and spanking new portfolios when we came back in the fall. In fact, a good reason to mistreat them was so that there would be no excuse to keep them. It was an anticipated ritual of autumn - new school supplies and a trip to Main Street in Ames for a fresh pair of sneakers and a foot x-ray.

In the local government, the ministerial portfolios are never new, just handed over to different people who make up a new cover for the thing out of an old grocery sack. At the end of the term, the contents are still the same, blurred a bit by attempts at keeping notes, but passed on, like a used college textbook, highlighted by the moron who took the course before you, underlining all of the wrong passages and then selling the thing for beer money before midterms.... or something like that.

Every once in a while, usually in response to shifts in the winds of political fortune (or is it intestinal fortitude), the PM will reshuffle the cabinet. This rarely involves bringing new people into the mix. Usually, the same cabinet flunkies are given different portfolios, these same folks who have cabinet level positions to begin with mostly because they are skilled political hacks and sing well the Party songs.

So a few weeks back, among a few other changes, the Deputy PM became the Jamaican Ambassador to the United States, the Evil Minister of Corrupt Police and Justice became the Evil Minister of Imports and Justice, the Minister of Transport and Works became the Minister of Corrupt Police, and the Minister of Mining became the Minister of Transport and Works, a position he ineffectively held two or three shuffles ago.

The former Minister of Transport and Works, ultimately responsible for the condition of the road today, will be safely away before the project collapses in flames, secure in the laurels of his intentionally and highly publicized successes with the Kingston bus system, expanding the port, and bringing in the Indians to fix the railroad. The new Minister can rightly claim that our problems all happened before he took office, which it did, although nobody will dare name who had the office beforehand.

Scooby sez: “It wasn’t me.”

In Running Away, Marley relates an old proverb, singing, “Every man t’ink dat ‘is burden is de heaviest.”

Perhaps I place too much importance to my own work, to think that the difficulties in constructing my one little highway have forced a change upon the national political structure. But still, it seems that a heap of our project burdens could be relieved if only one would t’ink a little more.

“Who feels it, knows it, lawd.”

As it is, the Client’s project management team have turned off the thought process altogether, in favor of either absolutely no action or frantic and unplanned immediate action. It looks like a deranged foot shooting exercise. They do not really promote self mutilation, but they do have a gun and a foot, and they are under such pressure to perform that they feel they must pull the trigger or nothing at all will happen.

It is nice that they have a plan,… of sorts.

Except, they keep missing the mark. Even their poorly laid plans go astray.

Oft,... Quite oft.

But really, how can you miss your own foot? It be right at the end of your leg. Just point and shoot,... unless your eyes are closed, and your hand is shaking, and you feel compelled to pull the trigger, pull the trigger, pull the trigger.
The result is that, by the time you finally blow off your toes, you have put a lot of holes in the walls and the floor, you blasted to bits your one table lamp that you never really liked to begin with, you woke the neighbors, and you have that stupid “oops” look on your face when the cops bust down the door.

“It wasn’t me.”

So who do you turn to when the project is in flames, fueled and fanned by the owner? The coworkers, of course, and each Friday night, at promptly 19:00, we grab the spouses and head out for chow and as many beers as we can manage and still have someone standing who can drive us home. We have few rules for this gathering. The main one is for the wives’ benefit - no shop talk. The compliance with this rule lasts a couple of minutes, generally. But if we catch ourselves, we do better for the next few minutes.

The work is all encompassing and all consuming, though, and generally one heck of as good time, despite what I may infer to the contrary. So we talk about what we have in common. Engineers talk engineering, and we talk it so much that the wives could now do a better job than the government, and would if they could, just to shut us up for a while.

Recently, we have been meeting prior to our Friday dinner at the yacht club for their happy hour (three for two beverages and stamp and go and smoked marlin for appetizers). What oftentimes results is that the yacht club beers are well cold and free flowing, and the food is usually tasty, so we stay there for supper instead of finding a vehicle and going into town. This saves us from actually driving anywhere as the yacht club shares a fence and gate with our complex. To our spouse’s detriment is that the other club members know why we are on the island, and they tend to quiz us about our work and we quickly lose sight of “the rule”.

Ah well, the bitching is half the fun, and it is usually over well before breakfast. In addition, having it out with the locals is our way of affecting public opinion with regards to the real reasons the road is in the shape it is.

“It wasn’t me.” Read More......