All Peachy

My life got suddenly easier about a week ago when I finally got a new generator from China.  It took six months from ordering and paying, to receiving it.  The battery bank after 16 years of toil, was down to its last few percent of capacity.  It wasn’t obvious to me how aged and degraded the battery bank was until the constant input from the generator was out, testing the capacity which towards the end went rapidly downhill.  I ordered another set of batteries from a Cairns company, but it took a couple of weeks to arrive.  During that time I had to poke along the batteries using a petrol genset, but they were exhausted 3 hours later.  In the day if the sun was shining, which wasn’t often, I could wait until 8pm before firing up the infernal combustion engine and run it for an hour or two, more would be pointless as the batteries couldn’t absorb more.  Then getting up every 3 hours during the night to fire it up again, then 1 hour later to turn it off.  That was just to keep the lights on for the guests.  The inverter is factory set to drop out when the battery volts go below 21V for more than 3 seconds to protect the batteries.  Sometimes I didn’t make all the night calls and the system shut down.  Mostly when the guests were asleep (but I was not), so they didn’t notice.  It is rather like having babies again.  I went through the ‘great sleep deprivation experiment’ some 30 plus years ago having 2 kids, but I didn’t expect to have to do it again.  This reminds me what my daughters are currently or recently going through with their little tots.  It is a hard row to hoe, especially when I have had 30 years remission.

By extraordinary bad luck (for both of us), I had a guest who suffered from sleep apnea and required a powered face mask for blissful sleep.  I failed to provide the power throughout the night on several occasions.  He was most understanding and assured me that he wouldn’t croak, just choke.  The thing is that babies provide a very audible alarm, but the electrical system didn’t.  Then the new batteries arrived.  Batteries are batteries and you just plug them in, right?  Not quite.  They weigh a ton.  Literally.  I had to reconfigure my battery cupboard with 2 extra wooden shelves 75mm thick to take the weight.  They only just fit in.  Then the small matter of backing up the ute to within a couple of meters of their final resting place and popping them on the shelves.  They weigh 85kg each, on 3 levels, and I’m an OAP.  Not up to the job without help.  Fortunately, my daughter’s partner, and father of my 2 grandchildren (are you two ever going to get married?) have bought a 250 acre property just down the road and he helped me hump them onto the shelves and connect them up.  Thanks Blue.

A ton of batteries

Then a couple of weeks later the long anticipated generator arrived.  Its extraction from the clutches of the predatory “Customs Brokers” was achieved by my son-in-law Karine after I spat the dummy in my frustration and told them to heave it into the harbour.  I remembered he is a ‘Materials and logistics manager’ in Darwin and in frustration phoned him mainly for a big whinge and was I being ripped off.  Import isn’t his speciality but was for a coworker whose answer was “Yes, you are being ripped off’ but there is nothing you can do about it.  Kairne’s calmer head and greater skill and experience rescued the situation to get the generator mobile again.  There was a hitch in Bowen where it was off-loaded with a larger consignment and lost for a week or two, but he was able to trace it and get it on the move again.  He reckons I owe him a beer.  I reckon if he says that, then a slab is only a token of the effort he went to.  Again Blue, the true stalwart he is, was available to help me hump the generator down the waterfall to install it.  It worked and is working now.  Oh frabjious day!  I am now wallowing in surplus power, freed of the sleep torture, and have luxuriated in long hot showers after a winter of discontent and cold showers.  (Smart arse Shakespeare quote from Lear).

So the batteries cost about $10,500, and the new generator about $190 in China with a bit of freight and about $800 after every gate-keeping broker and bureaucrat in Australia had clipped the ticket with improbable fees such as “cargo management re-engineering fee”.  What really annoyed me was that I had to employ the services of a ‘Customs Clearance broker’ to interface with customs, but I had to do all the work of getting all the documents together!  The system is cracked as I am one who doesn’t have any of the information.  There is this very nice girl in China called Lisa, (a name for the benefit of westerners) who was constantly apologising for her assumed mistakes (actually caused at this end) and her bad English (it was pretty awful but fantastically better than my Mandarin).  She had been working in another department, but suddenly found herself handling overseas inquiries.  About the fourth person I had dealt with.  I think there is a lot of churn in employment positions in China.  I found myself reassuring her that she was doing great, but could she just make this amendment to that document and put it on the company letterhead, then change the boat it came on, retype the invoice so it didn’t contain the word proforma, answer question 4 in the packing declaration as a No, otherwise customs would demand a certificate, etc, etc.  It was evident that she didn’t have any first hand knowledge of the answers to these questions and neither did I.  Two completely ignorant people to any of the answers quietly conspiring to make the paperwork fit together.  If I employ a ‘clearance broker’ aren’t they supposed to do this shit?? Was it packed with any organic material other than the wooden crate?  I guessed no and directed her to answer that.  When I got the crate I found there was no organic packing.  But I never would have gotten the crate at all unless I made up the answers beforehand.  Thank you gentle Lisa for your help.

I wasn’t going to bang on further about the archaic import system, but it seems I have.  Sorry about that.  Perhaps I have in mind old B grade movies of docks in the days of sail where the wharves were bustling and infested with thieves and drunks, whores and pickpockets, rowdy taverns and wandering press gangs.  Well I think nothing much has changed, except the thieves now have computers and government accreditation.  As did the press gangs in those days, the accreditation that is.