First posted 20 November 2011
On the 14th of September 2011 I was in the village of Chi Pat, in the jungle of Western Cambodia.
Chi Pat is, by Western standards, a very basic and not at all wealthy little village with very basic accommodation, electricity five hours a day and, strangely enough, 24-hour 3G mobile phone coverage that’s better than what I usually get at home.
Shortly before I left for Cambodia I discovered a job I was interested in, and wanted to apply for it. Being a government job, it would require a detailed 2,500 word response and was due mid-way through my holiday.
I wanted to work on the application during my travels, but with the combination of so many things happening, my procrastination, and the fact that I was on holiday, I didn’t get too much done in the early stages. So the night before it was due I prepared most of the material, and got only a few hours’ sleep.
The day the application was due was also the day I’d be travelling out of Chi Pat, making working not quite as easy as it might otherwise have been.
From 07:15 on Tuesday morning I was sitting on a little rickety local river boat. If was bucketing down with rain. I put the rain coat the boat driver gave me over my backpack and put my own big rain coat over my head. I put my laptop on my knee and under the rain coat, activated internet access for my laptop through my phone, and proceeded to do the final editing and lodgement of my application.
The rain coat allowed no air through, because it’s designed to allow no water through. So it became a bit of a sauna under there. A sauna in a boiling hot jungle location. A beautiful boiling hot jungle location that I was missing completely.
My laptop battery was fading fast because I’d had nowhere to plug its three pronged plug in the village for the last three days. I’d gone through one and a half long-life laptop batteries already (I was carrying a spare), saving my photos from my “adventures” and working on my application. The laptop said it had a little over one hour of battery life left. I had 1:45 left to the deadline at 09:00, and knew it would be tight, and the deadline was not variable.
Throughout the boat trip the internet connection kept failing, probably because the boat was moving around corners and behind hills (although I often had trouble when the phone said it had a good signal).
My laptop kept getting wet as the edges of the raincoat over my head didn’t provide perfect cover. I was increasingly worried that my laptop would die under the endless dripping water (but fortunately not the downpour on the other side of my raincoat on my head). As it was, my laptop has been giving me hardware error messages since that experience – probably because a USB power connector on the side of the laptop shorted.
I kept having to stop to wipe water off my screen and keyboard, in the process brushing the Wi-Fi on/off button so losing my internet connection. Again.
Often I lost my internet connection when I was part way through filling in a complex on-line form as part of the application. Sometimes I lost all the data I’d just spent 15 minutes writing, sometimes I didn’t.
Before I started I checked how much credit I had left on my pre-paid Cambodian mobile phone SIM. It said it had what I thought was enough. I discovered later that I didn’t – my connection ran out of credit almost immediately after I’d finished.
I hadn’t spoken to the boat driver at all. We didn’t share a language, but I normally try to exchange grunts and it felt odd to me that I was just hiding under this raincoat with a laptop while we putted down the river. I’m sure it seemed a little odd to him too.
The on-line application system for the job gave a time to the deadline. I saw it say 45 minutes. Then 25. I’d lose my internet connection for ten minutes at a stretch, and I didn’t know whether I’d have to re-do some forms as a result of the lost connection.
I’d written up most of my application the previous night, but discovered when I was finalising the application that part of my response wouldn’t work, so had to do some frantic last-minute modifications. Very last minute.
I didn’t know when the boat trip would end. I didn’t have time to check my location on the GPS unit in my phone. But if it ended before I’d finished then I’d have to pack everything up, losing my work and time in the process.
This was getting more than a bit stressful. But I was determined to succeed.
I’d like to go through the list of things that seemed to be trying to stop me finishing the application.
Rain
Trying to work while on holiday.
Working on a professional Australian job application on a little boat on a river.
… in the jungle
… in Cambodia
I was being helped and guided in my travels by people who probably couldn’t dream of the income of what I considered to be the very ordinary job I was applying for.
- It was raining … lots.
- I was hiding from the rain in my own personal little sauna.
- I was running out of laptop battery power.
- My laptop kept getting wet, and showed signs of failing as a result.
- The deadline for the application was rapidly approaching.
- I kept losing my internet connection.
- More rain.
- I had to re-do some forms because of the lost connection.
- My phone credit was running out.
- I was travelling through fantastic unspoilt rainforest, but was seeing none of it.
- I was very low on sleep.
- The boat trip was going to end soon.
By the end, I had about five minutes of laptop, battery left, about 50KB of data left on my phone (I discovered afterwards), less than 10 minutes left to the deadline, my laptop was developing problems from the rain, and as I emerged from my sweaty rain cover the bridge that marked the end of my trip was about 40 metres away.
But through a frantic last minute effort I managed to submit the application in time, and to a reasonable level of quality. When I emerged from the rain coat I saw the bridge the marked the end of the boat trip. The degree of multiple perspectives of “last-minute” was a bit overwhelming. A big bit.
If I was religious or spiritual I’d say that someone was testing me, and demonstrating to me that I can achieve things against great obstacles. As it happens, I’m not, so it’s just a weird set of coincidences which I pushed through just in time, all conducted in a surreal correlation of environments of my accidental choosing.
And, I think, worth writing about.
Chris Malcher