1. The Period (A Restart)

It was about making time, it was about not having time, it was an era of having post-nominals, it was an era of just having middle initials, it was a period of narcissism, it was a period of isolation, it was the time of social media, it was the time of real talk, it was creating awareness on climate change and sustainability, it was creating change at the expense of extinguishing life while calling it collateral damage, it was seizing the day as life is short, it was demystifying the theory of happily-ever-after, we were all moving forward the opposite way—in a nutshell, the season was like having a two-way ticket with you going back to point A after reaching point B, in a cosmic duality of Ying or Yang, in a Zen-like way of looking at it.

I apologise for the parodic attempt on Dickens. But it had me thinking and writing again.  

I finished several self-help books yesterday: three in three days, which is not bad. That is not to mention I am still recovering from the recent transition phase I have been through the last two months. Slowly but surely building up the habit: the writing habit and restarting the RICS APC. I started with a bang yesterday morning by writing a review of a book I bought in Kindle the night before, read it, and by four the following morning, wrote a not-too-bad review to get the habit sort of rolling again.

At work, if you plot the tasks on a graph, there is a gradual decrease as they (the Client) expected us (the Main Contractor) to have completed a significant number of sections of work by end of this year. I am not sure I am happy how things are going at the office. Management scheduled a section manager for demobilisation on the 30th of this month, but the latter was all smiles—fellow was happy because he’s leaving Alcatraz. Eventually, the project will end: I am at a dilemma whether a transfer to a new project (not even sure if we have a new site to go) is practical or if I should send CVs. I did not submit my RICS APC PER submission last September hence that would mean: I still have to be in Qatar until the end of next year. Had I successfully submitted my first PER submission this year, an optimistic completion of my APC endeavour would have been somewhere between May and June. But it didn’t happen as planned just the way we have planned our project for eight years in running.

I also started reviewing my technical competency writeup for my APC. I am surprised that Dropbox did not make any notification—I didn’t notice that my counselor reviewed and already made a score of comments on my draft writeup. I started on that one, too: slowly but surely. The writeup has three parts: level 1, deals with how I gained knowledge or the experience to make me competent (contract practice); level 2, this one’s on the doing part, e.g. produce a cash flow forecast based on the timescale between the payment application and the payment prescribed in the Subcontract Agreement’s payment clause; level 3, is on advising—this is where I will do a bulk of revisions based on my counselor’s review. Come to think of it, I just realised—just now—why it’s called ‘Dropbox.’

Restart when you’re almost at the end.