don't give up your day job

Have you ever gone to a dodgy public toilet, where the cubicle's door doesn't quite shut properly? Either the whole toilet block is left wanting for doors with fully functional locks, or you're busting to go so badly that you're willing to take a chance on the cubicle that no one dares to try lest the door swings open on them mid-pee. So what you end up doing is bolting right in there and going about your business in as efficient a manner as possible, whilst stretching your non-dominant arm out in an effort to pre-empt someone else accidentally barging in. The result is typically a rushed and forced visit to the ablutions, and even though the job gets done, you're left feeling a little more stressed than relieved.

That's kinda what it's like to be on very short notice to move.

For three to six months of the year, because I'm part of an expeditionary combat support squadron, a select few wind up with the (un?)fortunate task of being online. This means that if some kind of situation occurs where assistance of a military nature would be beneficial, we're the people that are supposedly lined up and ready for action within about 12-24 hours. There aren't many restrictions on personnel during the online period, but I suppose that the main ones are that we must remain sober enough to drive (< 0.05 BAC) and able to report back to base within twelve hours (or generally stay within a three-hour 'radius'), which is somewhat harder to manage during the holiday season.

I don't drink very often, and have found that when I do, I'm better off only having a couple anyway. So it's really no big deal for me to avoid imbibing alcohol when I'm on annual leave. The tricky thing for me about a week ago was that when I initially got a message/call about flooding in Rockhampton, I was in Melbourne... about a twelve hour drive from Newcastle. I wasn't given much information initially, but as soon as I was told I was on 12 hours notice, my already warped holiday sleeping patterns got slightly more erratic. It's like trying to sleep whilst knowing that your front door is wide open, or with your last thought that it's only four hours until your alarm goes off. You just can't put these facts easily out of your mind in order to get a decent night's rest.

Fortunately, a couple of days after the Rockhampton message, one of the Corporals called me back and said that if they were going to send any cooks up north, it would only be three or four and wouldn't be me because I was one of the furthest away from base at the time. I got to sleep easy that night, but after looking at the news reports I figured that they'd need able hands to help out with the search and rescue process, and maybe the clean up once the rain had gone away if anything. Not cooks. We're usually the last to be sent anywhere, so I wasn't going to get my hopes up. Yes, I am one of those freaks who actually wants to be deployed somewhere to assist wherever I can. I don't see the point in being online if we're seldom called up to do what we're on standby for in the first place.

A couple of days ago, Toowoomba was flooded. With storms equal or greater in severity to those that came through the area in the mid-seventies, Brisbane was next on the list with extreme flood warnings. Dams that had been built to circumvent flood damage mere decades ago were fit to burst, and just as I was settling into a lovely corner of the Blue Mountains (about three hours away from base), I got a phone call.

'Hey there, where are you at the moment?'

'I'm in the Blue Mountains, still on the way home from Melbourne. I think I'm about three hours away from base, but I'm heading back tonight.'

'Oh good. Because as you know, you're on the short notice to move team. We've now been told that sixteen of us, including you, are now on three hours' notice.'

'I'd better start driving, then.'

'Be safe, and speak to you soon.'

I drove back to base last night, and figured that I should just try to get a decent night's sleep instead of staying up to dye my hair back to black and pack things that I wasn't sure I needed. Got up this morning and made an appointment with the derby girl who put red in my hair in the first place, and while I was in the midst of normalising my hair colour again I missed a call.

It was work, informing me that there was a 5% chance we could be flying out tonight, so I should get my affairs sorted for a quick departure. Failing any further phone calls, we were to be meeting at 0630 the next day in cams, with an echelon bag packed and ready to roll. There was a 95% chance that a hundred people (including a selection of motley cooks) from our squadron will be flown north to help out with flood relief. That's pretty good odds of me not knowing where I'm going to be this time tomorrow, or next week, or even next month if it comes to that.

The thing is, you know that dodgy public toilet door feeling I was talking about before? That's what it's like when you really don't know what's going to happen and whether anything will even happen. I'm sort of anticipating things now, and I don't feel nervous so much as impatient about the timing of stuff. There's a small part of me that's enthralled by the logistics of organising such a massive rescue/cleanup effort, but I also don't want to get too keyed up about everything because there is still a chance that I won't get sent anywhere to do anything, and this time next week I'll be back in a kitchen about fifty metres from here, feeding the masses. I also have homework to do, laundry to sort out, and obligations to pull out of at very short notice... but that's a very tiny part of the bigger picture.

For all my whining, I am immensely grateful that I have the opportunity to do so from a position of emotional and physical safety. I've never had to deal with disasters of this scale before, and I'm not too sure what to expect. I hope to stay in touch with people over the next 24 hours, and may have access to my netbook while we're placed in transit accommodation, but there's no guarantees. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, and if there is anything you can do to help, please do.



Hang in there, Queensland.

the spice of life

Hello civilians, look at your recipe, now back to me, now multiply your serves by a hundred, now back to me. Sadly, you’re only serving 4-6 people, but if you were a military cook, you could be prepping for hundreds like me. Anything is possible with All Spice and bulk cookery. I’m on a function.

it's not what you know, it's who you know...

For those who don't really know what's involved with Geospatial Intelligence, I sort of liken it to playing with Google Earth for a living.

The weird thing is that for a job which is clearly quite important, yet requires a specific skillset which people might not necessarily know they actually have, I think that the RAAF struggles for numbers because it's kind of obscure and also requires a ridiculously high security clearance which can take 18+ months to obtain.

So the Chief of Air Force has established a new program where Any Airman (ANYA) roles in this area have been created, involving a three year posting that includes training as a Geospatial Imagery Analyst (GIA) and deployment to the Middle East to carry out relevant duties. Depending on one's performance in the ANYA role, this could also facilitate a future remuster (changing of job) to GIA.

I've missed the boat for the first intake of ANYA GIAs, but it's definitely piqued my interest. Strangely enough, it was the reservist Logistics Officer that I spoke to a few times last year who first got me considering the possibility of intelligence related jobs. Perhaps if I collected more university units to do with international relations or counter-terrorism (yes, they do exist!) I could get a taste for secret squirrel business, and seem like I have a relevant degree.

I wonder how people get recruited for these jobs, if they supposedly have no previous experience and thus no evidence of how good they'd be at spying? Personally, I like the idea of analysing and scrutinising things for a living... it'd probably mean that I'd be too mentally exhausted at the end of the day to philosophise about the minutiae of my own life.

There's also something kinda Sim Cityesque about looking down on the world like some God whose subjects have no idea that they're being watched. Or maybe that's just me.

Test your skills at the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation Imagery Analysis Quiz!

origins of an ironed chef

When I was growing up, Mum worked in a Chinese restaurant some nights, so Dad chipped in a lot with the cooking at home. I have plenty of fond memories relating to dishes that both of them made, which I never learned how to replicate for myself.

Mum’s from Taiwan, and a lot of the dishes she makes involve pastry or dough. I have a feeling that she won’t tell me her dumpling recipe because she knows deep down that it’s the one thing I’ll always have to go back home for. That, and she’s been making them for so long that she probably doesn’t even know how much of each ingredient goes into the mix. I don’t remember having measuring cups or jugs in the house – it must have been a combination of muscle memory, and the ratio of whatever felt right in her hands alone.

I used to love watching her make the wrappers for the dumplings – money was probably too tight to lash out on manufactured ones, or she was of the thought that processed wrappers were a waste of money if all it took was time to invest in rolling out homemade versions. The rhythm of the rolling pin, which was nought more than a thick dowel, would mesmerise me as I watched the small ball of dough become a circular shell for a dumpling. Then the steadily growing stack of wrappers would each receive a dollop of filling in its centre and be sealed off with several deft pinches from fingertips dipped in water.

Whenever I tried to help Mum out, on the very rare occasions that she’d let me have a go, I’d almost always stuff up somehow. Whether it was cutting out noodles and rolling too enthusiastically with the machine, or waiting to crack an egg into batter and clumsily landing some shell into the mix, or not sealing the ends of a spring roll adequately… Mum would sigh in exasperation and take whatever task I was attempting out of my hands. I was more of a hindrance than a help, no matter how good my intentions were.

As I got older, I was allowed to assist with basic prep tasks. The kind of stuff Mum would do while watching the television – taking the tops and tails off snow peas and beans. I remember a few times when there’d be a big function coming up at work, and Mum would have to take stuff home to prep for the next day. Maybe I was a little too excited at the prospect of threading thousands of satay chicken skewers, but there was something that just felt good when I was being useful in the kitchen and not just a pain in the butt.

Dad was particularly overprotective of me when I was a kid, which frustrated me to no end because I think he must have known that I’d inherited some of his inquisitive and adventurous nature. I was never allowed to cut anything, or cook anything, while I was growing up. Sometimes I wonder whether my fear of knives and fire is actually something that I’ve always had, or whether it came from having so many lectures drummed into me about how dangerous a place the kitchen was. Of course, Dad probably had no idea that all his warnings against me messing about in the kitchen were like the psychological equivalent of a ‘Wet Paint’ sign.

I can’t remember how old I was, when we first got a microwave. It wasn’t long until my brother and I were allowed to graduate to two-minute noodles cooked on the stove, and I became a little more curious about expanding my repertoire. After much begging and pleading, Dad finally let me pick out some ingredients for a stir-fry, promising that some day in the week he’d show me how to cook it all up.

It was school holidays or something similar, and no one was home when I decided it was the perfect time to try and guess how to cook a stir-fry. Just imagine how impressed my folks would be that I had made lunch/dinner all by myself! I couldn’t wait for Dad’s vital masterclass on stir-fries, so I cobbled together whatever memories I had of the steps my parents took when cooking one. As it turns out, I probably should have paid more attention, and I believe that up until that point I had never seen them actually cook a stir-fry from start to finish – possibly because I had always been booted out of the kitchen for being annoying whilst they were trying to get dinner ready!

The good news? Well, I didn’t burn the house down. The bad news – it was a minor disaster. I had way too many vegetables, none of which were consistently sized enough to cook at a similar rate, I think I used too much sauce and not enough oil, and threw in uncooked rice for good measure. Oh, and my solo cooking adventure was also the first and last time I was allowed to do anything in the kitchen that didn’t involve the microwave, toaster, or two-minute noodles. No unsupervised use of knives and open flames for me!

I never got that lesson on stir-fries. Perhaps my folks decided then and there that hospitality was definitely not my calling. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved food, and was certainly more interested in what was for dinner and how it was made than my brother ever was, but neither of my parents thought it was a good idea to encourage me to cook. I actually didn’t learn a proper stir-fry method until I went to TAFE a couple of years ago – shameful, I know.

It often baffles people to hear that I can’t stand doing stir-fries, and although I love to eat a lot of different Asian cuisines, I get this weird mental block about trying to cook them. I suppose it’s comparable to how I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable whenever I try to speak the pitiful amount of Mandarin that I know. I went to classes for years to try and learn it properly, but often got tongue-tied even though in my head I knew what I was trying to say. Yet after studying Italian in school and working in a couple of Italian restaurants, I had no qualms about slipping in the odd Italian phrase here and there in conversation with customers and colleagues.

Perhaps it’s never too late to learn. Maybe I should go back home some time and spend an afternoon cooking with Mum or Dad, and take some notes on what they do and how. I don’t mean to lament that all their recipes are lost forever, because they’re not, but I guess it saddens me that they never saw it as particularly important to pass any of their culinary knowledge on to me. They were always happy enough to feed me, and even take requests, but now that I’m older and my visits to Melbourne tend to be more fly-by-night, it’s more likely that I’d stop by Mum’s just before dinner with friends… or I’ll catch up with Dad at our regular yum cha hangout.

Sometimes I wonder whether they’re proud of the fact that I made it somewhere in hospitality, despite all their efforts to keep me out of the kitchen. There are times when I’ve been chuffed yet still surprised to receive compliments about my cooking, almost as if I’m still that kid messing about with a wok while home alone, trying to prove something to myself as well as my folks about the kitchen not being the place for me.

I’ve been cut, bruised, soaked, splashed, and burned in the relatively short time that I’ve been cooking. I’m no longer scared of knives and fire – it’s the cutting and burning that I’m more worried about. What’s amusing is that a couple of birthdays ago, I received knives as gifts from three people, and last Christmas I got a blowtorch. Maybe I’m the most dangerous thing in the kitchen?

Well, I can’t say my folks didn’t try to warn me.

strategic reform - a cook's view

In another time, another world, the words 'strategic reform program' would probably send me to sleep. Defence's overall plan for SRP (we do love a good acronym to throw around like confetti) has been the talk of the town for the past few months, and with its implementation will come various changes, most of which will no doubt irritate the old boys' club.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no expert on reform, let alone strategic reform, or even Defence strategic reform. However, I've been around for long enough to acknowledge that the kind of people that bang on about 'the good old days' and how they're over, are exactly the sort of people that wouldn't necessarily hold back, yet wouldn't exactly embrace changes to the status quo. No matter how strategic they may or may not appear to be.

What I found particularly amusing the other day is that one of the agencies responsible for supervising the implementation of SRP is Defence funded, and has supposedly fudged budget predictions to show false or exaggerated numbers relating to proposed savings. I don't know how you'd be able to prove either way whether proposed savings are realistic or not, because it's essentially all conjecture. I think that if actual changes were rolled out and then the data relating to real savings came out from that, it would be slightly more encouraging to the general public.

Defence is a massive organisation in Australia, and as with any business, the little savings that can be made every day don't seem as important or noticeable as slashes to departmental budgets or staff cuts. I believe that we've probably gone for too long thinking in this mindset, and because we're such a large group of people, we have the numbers that mean if the majority of individuals take some positive action most days, it really can make a difference.

With all that said, I have a few suggestions that could contribute to savings for Defence. I don't imagine they'll actually get considered let alone implemented, but you know, I've been saying for a while that if I had my own military, I would run things quite differently. :)

1. Once a month, across all Defence establishments, run a vegetarian-only day. If my base is a typical example of meals that are offered in accordance to SUPMAN (Defence policy on food entitlements), every meal period has a choice of five meat dishes and one vegetarian dish. One of those meat dishes is usually a roast of some kind. Meat is expensive, and not a compulsory requirement for one's daily nutritional intake. Even if the roast choice was changed so that the slab of meat could be used for the equivalent of two or three other dishes, there would be significant savings, as well as a greater appreciation for when a roast dish is available.
2. Remove valuable Defence members from inflight kitchens, and outsource the provision of sandwiches, morning teas, inflight meals, barbecue packs, etc. to civilian contractors. The amount of money that is invested in training deployable catering staff which is then wasted by tying them up with tasks that civilians are capable of doing is indicative of the irrationality that governs certain Defence resources.
3. Buy in enough raw ingredients to produce sweets for all meals. At the moment we don't usually have the staff time available for constant large-scale sweets production, but if you compare the cost of having a permanent sweets position versus buying in frozen sweets to cut up and garnish, the former may actually be cheaper in the long run. One of my colleagues believes we should just spend the money on buying in individual frozen sweets that don't require cutting/garnishing/plating, but his method saves Defence catering time, while my idea cuts down on the cost spent on sweets.
4. While I'm on the sweets thing, perhaps there should be a review of what SUPMAN has to say about having sweets available for lunch and dinner. Is cake really an essential part of one's daily diet? Even back in rookies, when we were exercising most days of the week, we were advised to take it easy with the dessert bar. Imagine what some people are like once they have moved into more sedentary roles, and still have the same access to sweets and ice cream? I don't think it would kill anyone to have a sweets-free day once in a while, or to only have sweets available with lunch or dinner, but not both.

These are only a few ideas that relate to catering, which I've managed to come up with straight off the bat. I'll mull over a few more that may apply to more than just my section, but I figure that any change to what people eat or are allowed to eat would no doubt be unpopular. Unless they somehow find a way to feed people more.

I think that the key to improving things in the catering section is to increase the quality of the food, work on realistically altering people's expectations of what's available in 2010 and beyond, and then meet or exceed them.