Day 1: Catastrophe Central

The day of disaster began at 5am, when I woke in the world's comfiest bed. Yep, 5am...with eyelids heavy as lead I thought that the day could only get better from there, right?

But before I get to today, let me talk a little about the amazing party pad I'm occupying at the moment. Think giant one bedroom apartment in a 5 star residential hotel, with shiny new fittings (granite, chrome, polished wood - you name it), dual LCD TVs in both living and bedroom, full kitchen, laundry, blahblahblah...I'm in wanker heaven. I can't believe my company would shell out this much $$ for any of their employees. The rest of the hotel is pretty amazing too. The numerous guards (some wielding giant guns or minding bomb sniffer dogs) greet you with a smile, and open every door for you. They provide you with fresh, sweet iced tea at the check in desk. The pool and spa area are pretty amazing too, and there's a giant fitness centre I plan to test out once I can drag myself off my lazy butt. Oh, and the hotel bar serves margaritas as big as my head, only one required for much silliness to ensue :P

But back to the day...after a quick cab ride past squalid slums separated from mammoth mansions by huge fancy gates, we arrived at work. Our friends from the Melbourne office were kind enough to take us and give us a tour of the building, because they've been here a few weeks already training another project. The building is brand new, and extra shiny. After the tour, we met the Manila managment team. They were all smiles at first, but first greetings soon gave way to worried looks as we discovered the following

• The Filipino trainer due to deliver Induction had not shown up for work, and her phone was switched off
• We had no training materials, because said trainer had been in charge of printing them and no one knew where they were
• We couldn't get access to our centralised knowledge base to print more training materials due to an IT fuckup over the weekend
• We couldn't get access to our Sydney email and server because of a firewall problem
• We had 15 brand new employees waiting to learn, and nothing to teach them.

Trying very hard not to freak out, we went to meet our new trainees. We introduced ourselves, and were then left alone for an hour trying to think of a way to occupy them while the contact centre manager (who looks totally overwhelmed ALL the time, poor man) tried to sort things out. It became apparent that the trainer wasn't just late, but is actually MIA...her phone switched off, and according to both her partner and her sister, dropped off the face of the earth. We're worried for her safety. But we had to carry on and make SOMETHING out of the day.

With a tremble in my voice I rang our client in Sydney, explained the predicament and asked her to email some training docs to the contact centre manager, who had email access. We rapidly worked out that bumping up our schedule by a day wasn't going to work, as there was no way we could work with the meager resources we had. So we turned the day into a massive teambuilding exercise.

We had the agents get to know one person in the group, then introduce that person to the rest. We then made a poster for our partners, so each person would have a space devoted to them on the wall in the call centre. That got them all involved and interested, and we shared heaps of laughs at our varying degrees of artistic skill. The day went OK after that, it was a muddled combination of games and giggles, and sneaking outside to check on the status of IT issues, missing staff members and equally absent training materials. By the time we left at 3pm, things were sorted enough that I'm fairly sure we'll be ready to train tomorrow. Which is good, cause I don't need to be up all night worrying!

I'm now back at the party pad, looking out across the city from my 12th floor window. There are huge bolts of lightning reaching down like hands towards the ground. That's the thing about the weather here - its hideously hot and muggy all day, and thunderstorms all night. I like the storms part.

A wee bit homesick sitting here alone, missing hugs. It'll be a while before I get any of those.